Econ 101 courses repeat the benevolent dictator theory of regulation: There is a "market failure," natural monopoly, externality, or asymmetric information. Benevolent regulators craft optimal restrictions to restore market order. In political life "consumer protection" is often cited, though it doesn't fit that economic structure.
Then "Chicago school" scholars such as George Stigler looked at how regulations actually operated. They found "regulatory capture." Businesses get cozy with regulators, and bit by bit regulations end up largely keeping competition down and prices up to benefit existing businesses.
We are, I think, seeing round three, and an opportunity for a fundamentally new basic view of how regulation operates today.
Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and used it to voice his own political and ideological views without a filter, President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight to go after him. During a press conference at the White House, President Biden stood at a podium adorned with the official seal of the President of the United States, and expressed his view that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.”1 When pressed by a reporter to explain how the government would look into Elon Musk, President Biden remarked: “There’s a lot of ways.”2 There certainly are. The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.
Today, the Federal Communications Commission adds itself to the growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses. I am not the first to notice a pattern here. Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that “the volume of government investigations into his businesses makes us wonder if the Biden Administration is targeting him for regulatory harassment.”3 After all, the editorial board added, Elon Musk has become “Progressive Enemy No. 1.” Today’s decision certainly fits the Biden Administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment. Indeed, the Commission’s decision today to revoke a 2020 award of $885 million to Elon Musk’s Starlink—an award that Starlink secured after agreeing to provide high-speed Internet service to over 640,000 rural homes and businesses across 35 states—is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.
When the Biden administration launches an "all of government" initiative, they mean all of government.
A tweeter queries
Show me the man, and I'll find the crime. Three felonies a day.
In the same vein, I found most interesting in the twitter files and scathing Missouri V. Biden decision the question, just how did the government force tech companies to censor the government's political opponents? "Nice business you have there. It would be a shame if the alphabet soup agencies had to look into it."
This doesn't fit either the econ 101, benevolent nanny, or regulatory capture view. Fundamentally, regulators have captured the industry, not the other way around. They hold arbitrary discretionary power to impose huge costs or just shut down companies. They use this power to elicit political support from the companies. There is a bit of old Chicago school capture in the deal. Companies get protected markets. But the regulators now don't just want a few three martini lunches and a cozy revolving door to "consultant" jobs. They demand, political support. The regulators are more political ideologues than gently corruptible insiders.
Sometimes regulators seem to attack businesses just for fun, like suing a moving company for age discrimination. But maybe here too they are showing everyone what they can do, or scoring some ideological points so people get the message.
The increasing arbitrariness of regulation is part of the process. I find myself nostalgic for the good old days of the Administrative Procedures Act, public comment, cost benefit analysis, and formal rule making. Now regulators just write letters or take legal action, which even if unsuccessful can bankrupt a company. Using administrative courts, the regulators are prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner all rolled in to one.
Unrelated. $885 million / 640,000 = $1,3825. The federal government apparently thinks it's worthwhile for taxpayers to pay $1,382 to give rural households access to satellite internet. If anyone asked, "would you rather $x in cash or a starlink account?" (which, I think, they also have to pay for) I wonder if x would be much more than $50.
The New Republic’s contributing editor and Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu had a curious posting this week as he offered a new definition of socialism for the public: socialism is simply cheaper products. Even Dell apparently is a socialist enterprise under Nwanevu’s new take. Capitalism? Anything that is too expensive. In other words, voters should elect socialists if they like sales.
There is a rising number of Democratic Socialists in Congress and in the Democratic party. Many are seeking to push this trend by getting young voters to identify as socialists. It may be working. Polls show that socialism is now as popular as capitalism with young voters.
Hopefully, they have a better handle on the subject than Nwanevu, who has also written for the New Yorker, Slate, and Harper’s.
Nwanevu wrote:
“Fundamentally, socialism is about buying affordable consumer products. Are you an Android user? That’s socialism. Do you have a Dell? That’s socialism. Shop at H&M? That’s socialism. The more expensive your stuff is, the more capitalist it is. Marx lays this out in Capital.”
It is wonderful to see those socialists hard at work at that proletarian paradise. . . Dell.
It is not clear where Marx laid out that socialism is like a never-ending Black Friday sale. He did say that “a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. ”
However, Marx was not exactly keen on the capitalist production system, even at a discount. He declared “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and the Prophets!” He also noted “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”
Putting that aside, socialist and communist systems historically have resulted in cheaper but fewer products. The old Soviet joke: A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, “You don’t have any meat?” The clerk says, “No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street.”
The infamous five-year plans of the Soviet Union led to widespread starvation and reduction of goods. What was produced was cheap but shoddy:
“For example, in the 1970s the Soviet Union produced 800 million shoes every year—enough to provide every citizen with three new pairs. But the quality, design, and fit were often so poor that many residents had to spend hours looking for a perfect pair, or buy imported shoes at vastly higher prices.”
Under no interpretation of Marx would Dell undercutting the market be viewed as socialism at work. To the contrary, such supply and demand decisions are more in line with Adam Smith than Karl Marx. The invisible hand of Smith favors certain goods and price points.
You can clearly have soft socialist systems that centralize economies and force the redistribution of wealth without the authoritarianism of communist. They are not synonymous. There are also variations of socialism from command economies to “market socialism.”
However, socialism also has not been shown to reduce prices as much as reducing products. Indeed, systems in countries like Venezuela often trigger rampant inflation and other collateral crippling economic problems.
Still confused, here is the famous primer often used on the rivaling systems in the context of a farmer with two cows:
Socialism: If you have two cows, the Government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
Communism: If you have two cows, Government takes both and then gives you some milk.
Fascism: If you have two cows, you keep the cows and give the milk to the Government; then the government sells you some milk.
New Dealism: If you have two cows, you shoot one and milk the other; then you pour the milk down the drain.
Nazism: If you have two cows, the Government shoots you and keeps the cows.
Capitalism: If you have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull.
I NEED YOUR HELP TO DEAL WITH CALIFORNIA’S OUT-OF-CONTROL LEGISLATURE: Have you ever wanted to give me a Christmas present? One that won’t cost you a nickel? Here’s how you can do it: The California legislature is again trying to repeal Prop 209–the 1996 amendment to the state constitution that prohibits preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity in public education, public education and public contracting. They tried this three years ago (Prop 16) and got spanked at the ballot box. We defeated them overwhelmingly even though they outspent us more than 14 to 1.
This time they are being trickier. Instead of a straight repeal, they are considering a referendum that would give the governor the power to grant “exceptions” to Prop 209. The bill–Assembly Constitutional Amendment 7 or ACA7–passed the Assembly in the autumn and will be before the Senate when the legislature reconvenes in January. I am hoping to convince the Senate that this is a bad idea. I don’t want to have to spend the better part of a year on another campaign.
A quick, cheap way to begin getting the Senate’s attention is through X (Twitter). I have put together photo parade of about 100 people holding “No on ACA7” signs. Last night I posted (tweeted) 24 of the photos. All of them were tagged to the Senate, leadership. Consequently, every time someone “likes” one of my posts (tweets), leaders of the Senate will get a little notification. Later today, tomorrow, and Friday, I will be posting more.
If readers with a Twitter account are so inclined, it would be great if you could go into my X/twitter page and “like” all the 24 photos I sent out last night. It would equally great if you could re-post/re-tweet a bunch of them. With any luck, the Senate leaders who are tagged won’t be able to ignore the number of notifications they get.
The Calif constitution’s ban on preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity was put there in 1996 by Prop 209. Now state legislators want to create an unlimited number of “exceptions.” They will swallow the rule. #NoACA7#KeepDiscriminationIllegalpic.twitter.com/sZVoh6PXVo
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education are following the lead of other major cities and eliminating gifted school programs in the name of achieving greater racial and social “equity.” Eleven “high-achieving selective-enrollment schools” will be eliminated, according to Chicago Board of Education CEO Pedro Martinez, to reduce “stratification and inequity.” As we have previously discussed, major cities with failing public education programs are erasing performance gaps in their schools by decapitating the top performers rather than elevating the performance overall. Other schools have also eliminated or lowered proficiency standards to achieve higher passage rates.According to the Daily Mail, the Board will vote today on the Mayor’s plan with the support of the president. The Chicago Tribune blasted Johnson in an editorial for reneging on a campaign promise not to abolish the selective schools.President Jianan Shi has portrayed gifted programs as just adding stress by allowing some students to achieve higher levels of education. Shi declared “the goal is […] to change (the) current competition model so that students are not pitted against one another, schools are not pitted against one another.”Some of these targeted schools are among the nation’s top performers, including Walter Payton College Prep (ranked 10th), Northside College Prep (ranked 37th), and Jones College Prep (ranked 60th). However, these schools only highlight the failure of the system overall.One can imagine how thrilled countries like China must be as we decapitate our educational system to bring down both standards and schools to a low median.
As previously discussed, school boards and teacher unions have long treated parents as unwelcome interlopers in their children’s education.
That view was captured in the comment of Iowa school board member Rachel Wall, who said: “The purpose of a public ed is to not teach kids what the parents want. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client is not the parent, but the community.”
State Rep. Lee Snodgrass (D-Wis.) tweeted: “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.”
Parents who question unpopular policies are often treated as extremists.
Michelle Leete, vice president of training at the Virginia PTA and vice president of communications for the Fairfax County PTA, said parents would not force them to reverse their agenda: “Let them die. Don’t let these uncomfortable people deter us from our bold march forward.”
I have been a huge supporter of public schools my whole life. While my parents could afford private schools, they helped form a group to keep white families in the public school system in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. They wanted their kids to be part of a diverse school environment. I also sent my kids to public schools for the same reason. I view our public schools as important parts of our society as we shape future citizens.
Teachers and boards are killing the institution of public education by treating children and parents more like captives than consumers. They are force-feeding social and political priorities, including passes for engaging in approved protests.
Once parents have a choice, these teachers lose a virtual monopoly over many families, and these districts could lose billions in states like Florida.
Chicago is literally telling families of highly competitive students to leave public education or reduce their expectations. For those who can afford it, they must now look to private or religious schools. Most cannot afford such choices and the state has long been hostile to vouchers. Indeed, the state (which has long been dominated by the far-left teachers union) recently became the first state to rollback on vouchers as other states are expanding such programs.
As a proud Chicago native, it is hard to watch what is happening in the city under Johnson and this city council. I still hope that sanity will take hold in the city before they do irreversible damage, but this education plan hastens the decline of one of America’s greatest cities.
Scientists—Expert scientists—have discovered that animals breathe. And they are none too happy about it.
For these same scientists tell us that animal respiration contributes to global warming. Now called “climate change.”
And things that contribute to global warming, now called “climate change”, should not be allowed, because “climate change”, once called global warming, is bad. Why? Don’t ask.
When I saw this shocking new research, I became alarmed. I knew there were a lot of animals in the world, and the wretched beasties breathe. Just how bad could animal breathing be? I checked.
Insects, once source claims, number some 10 quintillion. Which is 10^18. Which is a lot. Ants alone account for some 20 quadrillion breathers. That’s 20 x 10^15. Ants breathe. They suck up oxygen through what passes for their skin and, what’s worse, emit carbon dioxide through that same non-skin! And as every schoolchild has pounded into them from birth, carbon dioxide contributes to global warming, now called “climate change.”
There are 35 trillion fish, give or take a trillion. Breathers all. At least 50 billion birds take to the air. And you just know they’re sucking up a lot of air and spewing apocalyptic levels of CO2, beating their wings like maniacs.
Most of these creatures don’t contribute to the variety of animals as much beetles. What’s that quote about God loving beetles? Wokepedia says they make up about one full quarter of all animal species. Amazingly prolific breathing polluters!
Man is far down on the list. A mere 8 billion, and with birth rates being what they are, a number soon to diminish.
So if we’re going to cure global warming, now called “climate change”, by reducing CO2 we’re going to have to eliminate a lot of ants, fish, birds and beetles. We’re going to have to put a hard stop to their naughty breathing with some pretty brutal culling. Good news is we don’t need to bother with man, since he is outnumbered by so many other breathers.
One of two of these Experts have, it seems, some training in chemistry. So pay close attention to these sure-to-be accurate words from the Abstract: “Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which contribute to global warming.” Now called “climate change.”
I mean, who knew?
These Experts gathered “104 volunteers” and put the scientific method to work. They collected breath samples from these volunteers.
My favorite sentence in the whole paper is this: “The percentage of methane producers (MPs) identified in this study was 31%.”
Methane producers sounds like womb possessors to my ears. Oh, because somebody’s going to ask, yes: the word flatus does make an appearance. Not cows. Human flatus.
Amusingly, “Females (38%) were more likely to be MPs than males (25%),” which means that when the culling comes, women go first. And blacks. Yes: “African populations [are] much more likely to be MPs…”
Our Experts took at stab at estimating the amount of “climate change”-making breath from all the humans in the UK, and came to some number of tons of carbon dioxide per annum. They did not perform this same service for the more numerous other animals. So we must classify this research as preliminary.
I don’t know about you, my dear friends, but the first question that came to my mind when I read this breathtaking research was: how could people be this stupid?
It has been known for quite a while that man exhales CO2. The amounts were also on the books. Ask any doctor who graduated before the woke struck medical schools.
You can’t stop people from breathing. And you can’t stop more people from breathing more, it being the policy of the UK to replace the natives with “migrants”. All of whom breathe.
Could it be, could it really be, that these academic Experts want to reduce the surplus population to cut down breathing and save us from the ravages of global warming. Now called “climate change”?
Maybe, at some level. Imaging the tortuous death of our enemies is always a fun pastime, especially among academics. But a much more likely explanation is the deep desire to be thought profound and important.
All academics suffer this terrible disease. The need to produce “research” guarantees this affliction.
Global warming, now called “climate change”, is big. No bigger area of science. Regardless of your training, if you’re not active in this area who are you? Nobody, that’s who.
Before I let you go: our Experts forgot photosynthesis. How could they forget photosynthesis? Don’t know. But nearly every Expert does.
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The Kentucky lawmaker is an advocate for general American non-intervention in foreign conflicts and has been a sharp critic of Republican resolutions declaring support for Jerusalem and attempts to redefine antisemitism to include anti-Zionism.
THE EMPIRE STRIKES MUSK: “If you go back through the news over the past two years, you will see a steady stream of threats made by US and European government officials–elected and administrative–towards Musk. They made it very clear that he either gets on board with their agenda or the West’s governments would destroy him. Last week, I wrote about one case of the Biden Administration’s weaponization of government against Musk. Today I have the displeasure of reporting that the European Union is trying to shut down Twitter/X due to its nefarious practice of not policing speech harshly enough.”
Journalism is easy now. Just print the press releases from the favored political group.
Last week, when President Biden addressed the media ahead of a crucial vote on Ukraine spending, there were a few notes he considered important enough to hit twice, including this one:
Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies.
If the phrase felt a little light, it’s probably because you’re used to hearing Biden use another term, “Extreme MAGA,” which he did, for a long time, until the White House was warned by the Office of Special Counsel that invocations of “MAGA” may constitute Hatch Act violations. Presidents are ostensibly barred from using their title for electioneering purposes, so “extreme MAGA Republicans” become merely extreme in official appearances.
As Racket’s inimitable Matt Orfalea documents, however, the restraints come all the way off in campaign fundraisers. It seems in every appearance now Biden offers some combination of “extreme,” “MAGA,” “Republican,” and “determined to destroy democracy,” with the occasional “that sounds like hyperbole, but” as a setup line. And Biden, as relentless a catchphrase-deliverer as recent American politics has seen, goes there every time.
All presidential candidates repeat words, of course. Campaign strategists long ago realized political audiences don’t require coherent sentences, and respond to hearing words they like said over and over. “Responsibility” worked for Republicans, for instance, while “compassion” or “innovation” were typical Democratic choices. For Donald Trump, “radical left” is one of this year’s crutches. Still, Trump seems headed in a more unscripted direction, recently for instance bringing Pat Buchanan back to life and calling Steve Bannon “the greatest bullshit artist I’ve ever heard,” while his opponent has become more repetition-dependent.
Biden’s evocation of “MAGA” has been a bedrock of his campaign strategy. In his video address formally announcing his re-election run earlier this year, he brought up “MAGA extremists” are “lining up to take on our bedrock freedoms”:
Papers like the Washington Post have done features on Biden’s “theory of MAGA,” with “Bidenworld” sources telling Greg Sargent that the president is trying to draw a distinction between extreme Republicans and “more conventional ones.” Maybe there’s something to that, and this is Biden’s idea of reaching across the aisle. But Orf’s video suggests extreme MAGA determined destroy democracy is the magic spell for scaring the pockets of wealthy Democrats open.
In a related, also-very-interesting story, I strongly recommend readers check out Orf’s own site, The Orf Report, and read his recent piece on what he calls the “Vermin Switcheroo.” If you walked anywhere near a television or even caught the glow of a phone in a bus station or diner on or around Veteran’s Day, you probably heard furious commentary about Trump’s promise to “root out… vermin” upon election, and how this was “echoing Nazi propaganda.”
Orf found two punchlines to this oft-repeated story buried in the ol’ Memory Hole. One is that Trump critics had invoked the “vermin” term not just occasionally, but often, with descriptions of Trump followers and Republicans as vermin or rats in particular inspiring comic artists.
Orf notes a second oddity. Outlets like The Daily Beast initially didn’t make a connection to Nazi imagery. However, after a blue-leaning PAC called “Meidas Touch” put out a blog post on November 11th called, “Donald Trump echoes Hitler nearly verbatim,” Trump-vermin-Nazi stories not only flowed, they popped out one after the other using the same language, often with “echoing” in the lede or headline.
Well, you might say, so what? Can’t a lot of outlets make the same point? Absolutely. Campaign-watchers should be aware, however, that some reporters are on the mailing lists of organizations like the DNC, RNC, and the DCCC, and are seeing bullet-pointed news digests featuring “content to amplify” and “talking points” or “talkers.” When you see a lot of stories using the same language, it’s a good bet journalists are looking at such circulars, that used to be for politicians only.
DNC chair Jamie Harrison issued a statement on November 13th condemning Republican counterpart Ronna McDaniel for failing to refusing to “stand up to the de facto leader of her party” and “denounce” him for “parroting the language of Adolf Hitler” and using “rhetoric reminiscent of Hitler and Mussolini.” The Biden campaign followed with a similar statement, and the DNC highlighted stories in Forbesand The Washington Postthat used the “echoing Hitler” construction.
The Republicans absolutely do the same thing — if you’re wondering why the phrase “Biden’s open borders catastrophe” shows up in a lot of red-state media, this is your answer. General recommendations stressing “moral bankruptcy” have been a theme of Republican circulars as well. Again, there’s nothing wrong with it necessarily, especially not from the point of view of politicians. But it’s a little weak for journalists to get not only their ideas but their language from PACs or political memos. More from the always-vigilant Orf soon…
“According to the Claremont Institute’s Black Lives Matter (BLM) Funding Database,” I began, “Microsoft has contributed almost a quarter of a billion dollars to the BLM movement and related causes since 2020. This was done despite warnings at the time that BLM has neo-Marxist roots, pushes Anti-American values and promotes policies like defunding the police that harm the very communities it claims to help. Since that time, reports of mismanagement and self-dealing have raised serious questions about BLM’s use of donated funds. Most recently, BLM aligned itself with antisemitism by promoting pro-Hamas imagery in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. In light of all this, is Microsoft now prepared to admit its support of BLM was a mistake and renounce that support?”
Microsoft never answered the question. It’s unclear why, but Microsoft does provide a list of reasons it claims grant it the right to tell shareholders who own the company to go pound sand including, among other things, if it deems a submitted question to be “in bad taste.”
Perhaps relatedly, Microsoft did answer a general question regarding how it keeps “political ideology out of business decisions.” Unfortunately, the multi-paragraph answer provided absolutely no principle that shareholders could rely on to keep the political and ideological biases of relevant corporate decision-makers out of Microsoft’s decisionmaking.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: House committee debates space mining. “The hearing revealed a sharp partisan divide on the issue.” Which is a bit weird, since both the Trump administration and the Obama/Biden administrations have been strongly supportive. Though the divide discussed in the story doesn’t seem all that pronounced, really.
I opposed @Harvard firing their president, Claudine Gay. Having a plagiarist at the helm of our most prestigious academic institution is the perfect symbol for an utterly corrupt system.
This year almost 7 million people were uprooted in the Congo. Over the years over 5 million people have been killed in its wars. But it has one inestimable advantage. "Nobody cares." Not BLM, not the Ivy League, not the UN. Therefore it is not a problem.https://t.co/FhGIYdqVQ8
ENERGY: China brings world’s first Generation IV nuclear reactor online. “Generation IV reactors are the latest, long-anticipated nuclear power plants that promise to be cheaper, safer, and more efficient than the current reactors. They’re called Generation IV because Generation I were the first experimental reactors, Generation II were the first commercial reactors, Generation III were improved versions of Gen II, and Generation IV are the future reactors that incorporate new technologies, fuels, and basic designs.”
More stuff to file under “The 21st Century isn’t working out the way I thought it would.” According to Ars Technica:
“A lawyer representing Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen filed a court brief that cited three cases that do not exist, according to a federal judge. The incident is similar to a recent one in which lawyers submitted fake citations originally provided by ChatGPT, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether Cohen’s lawyer also used an AI tool.”
Ars Technica added this little gem: “Schwartz advertises his criminal defense services on a personal website with a tagline that says, “The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.”
He pleaded guilty to a separate charge in September of this year, admitting to concealing $225,000 in foreign payments from an Albanian official while working at the bureau.
A Wu administration official, on behalf of the mayor, mistakenly sent all Boston city councilors an email Tuesday inviting them to a holiday party that was meant exclusively for “electeds of color,” prompting an apology and mixed reactions.
Denise DosSantos, the mayor’s director of City Council relations, told the body’s “honorable members” that, “on behalf of Mayor Michelle Wu,” she was cordially inviting each of them “and a guest to the Electeds of Color Holiday Party on Wednesday, Dec. 13 at 5:30 p.m. at the Parkman House, 33 Beacon St.”
Approximately 15 minutes later, however, DosSantos sent out a follow-up email to city councilors, apologizing for the prior email, which was apparently only meant for those who were invited. The body includes seven white councilors and six of color.
“I wanted to apologize for my previous email regarding a Holiday Party for tomorrow,” DosSantos, a Cape Verdean Black woman, wrote. “I did send that to everyone by accident, and I apologize if my email may have offended or came across as so. Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.”
Whether the email offended the excluded councilors was unclear, several of whom chose not to respond to the Herald’s request for comment.
Outgoing City Councilor Frank Baker, who is white, described the mayor’s decision to exclude some members as “unfortunate and divisive,” but said the email didn’t offend him personally.
“I don’t really get offended too easily,” Baker told the Herald. “To offend me, you’re going to have to do much more than not invite me to a party.”
Baker said he wasn’t sure what the reasoning behind the mayor having a separate party based on racial lines was, but said he didn’t think it was a “good move,” given the recent tensions on the City Council.
A Boston reader coments:
Haha, the apology is not for staging a racist, exclusionary holiday party … in luxury city-owned digs … but for inadvertently sending the invite to white people.
That’s pretty fkkn precious. Makes Claudine Gay look … OK, no, that doesn’t make her look less Nazi.
Do these people not listen to themselves?
OK, white pol throws a party for white pols only, inadvertently sends invites to pols “of color.” Withdraws it with an “oops!”
You’d have people looting and burning shit over that one.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas testifies during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on November 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. The Committee held a hearing titled, "Worldwide Threats to the Homeland." (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
I am back in Washington, DC, today, testifying before the Homeland Security Subcommittee for Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability for a hearing on "Censorship Laundering Part II: Preventing the Department of Homeland Security's Silencing of Dissent."
Chairman Green, Chairman Bishop, Chairman Ivey, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting my testimony.
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Researchers asked by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to flag election and Covid misinformation to social media platforms in 2020 and 2021 say that they didn’t break the law. According to the leaders of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the other groups, they simply alerted social media platforms to potential violations of their Terms of Service. What the platforms chose to do after that was up to them.
But during the two years that these DHS-empowered researchers were asking social media platforms to take down, throttle, or otherwise censor social media posts, the President of the United States was accusing Big Tech of “killing people,” his then-press secretary said publicly that the administration was “flagging violative posts for Facebook,” members of Congress threatened to strip social media platforms of their legal right to operate because, they said, the platforms weren’t censoring enough, and many supposedly disinterested researchers were aggressively demanding that the platforms change their Terms of Service.
It's true that social media platforms are private companies technically free to censor content as they see fit and are under no clearly stated obligation to obey demands by the US government or its authorized “researchers” at Stanford or anywhere else.
But the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states clearly that the government should take no action that would limit free speech, and the record shows that the US government, in general, and the DHS in particular, did just that.
DHS supported, created, and participated in the 2020 Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL; the 2020 Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP; and the 2021 Virality Project, or VP. In the case of the EIP and VP, four think tanks led by Stanford Internet Observatory, or SIO, and reporting to CISA, demanded and achieved mass censorship of the American people in direct violation of the First Amendment and the prohibition on government agencies from interfering in an election.
A longtime US Navy officer and a UK military contractor created the so-called anti-disinformation wing of the CTIL in 2020. In so doing, they pioneered the misdescription of censorship laundering as “cyber-security.” They used CTIL as a front group to demand censorship and demanded that “cognitive security” be viewed as their responsibility, in addition to physical security and cyber-security.
CTIL created a handbook full of tactics, including demanding social media platforms change their terms of service. Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."
DHS publicly blessed this project, and its staff helped create CTIL’s “anti-disinformation” efforts.
The CTI League aimed to implement something called “AMITT,” which stood for “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques.” AMITT was a disinformation framework that included many offensive actions, including working to influence government policy, discrediting alternative media, using bots and sock puppets, pre-bunking, and pushing counter-messaging. The specific “counters” to “disinformation” in AMITT and its successor framework, DISARM, included the following:
“Create policy that makes social media police disinformation”
“Strong dialogue between the federal government and private sector to encourage better reporting”
“Marginalize and discredit extremists”
“Name and Shame influencers”
“Simulate misinformation and disinformation campaigns, and responses to them, before campaigns happen”
“Inoculate populations through media literacy training”
The explanations and justifications by the creators and leaders of the EIP and VP have shifted over the last nine months. At first, a SIO executive claimed in a video for DHS that the idea for EIP came from SIO’s interns, who happened to be working at DHS. More recently, another SIO executive claimed that the idea was his.
Then, last month, this committee released documents establishing that the DHS-authorized groups believed the idea had come from DHS. “We just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA,” said an Atlantic Council senior executive, Graham Brookie, in an email sent on July 21, 2020.
After Matt Taibbi and I testified before Congress in March, a SIO spokesperson says it “did not censor or ask social media platforms to remove any social media content regarding coronavirus vaccine side effects.”
That turned out not to be true, as internal messages from its operation, released publicly by this committee last month, proved.
Consider the language that these DHS-authorized individuals used:
“Hi Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter . . . we recommend it be removed from your platforms.”
“We repeat our recommendation that this account be suspended….”
“We recommend labeling….”
“We recommend that you all flag as false, or remove the posts below.”
Under the guise of a research project, EIP was enmeshed with the federal government leading up to the 2020 election. Four students involved with EIP were even employed by CISA. One Stanford student, for example, worked as a DHS intern “inside the EIP network.”
It is clear from the emails released by this committee that the supposedly independent Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and CISA were working together and interacted. One email from a Colorado official was addressed to “EI-ISAC, CISA and Stanford partners,” directly referring to EIP. The CISA-funded non-profit, Center for Internet Security (CIS), also sent alleged misinformation to social media companies.
CIS had previously claimed that its definition of election mis- and disinformation did not include “content that is polarizing, biased, partisan or contains viewpoints expressed about elections or politics,” “inaccurate statements about an elected or appointed official, candidate, or political party,” or “broad, non-specific statements about the integrity of elections or civic processes that do not reference a specific current election administration activity.”
But the DHS emails reveal that CISA and CIS did, in fact, consider such content to be subject to censorship. The emails show that CISA and its non-profit partners reported political speech to social media companies, including jokes, hyperbole, and the types of “viewpoints” and “non-specific statements” that CIS once claimed it would not censor. Using the pretext of “election security,” DHS sought to censor politically inconvenient speech about election legitimacy.
Messages one year later also showed VP researchers urging censorship of “general anti-vaccination” posts, of the CDC’s own data, of accurate claims of natural immunity, of accurate information from the journal Lancet, of anti-lockdown protests, and even of someone’s entire Google Drive.
In 2020, Department of Homeland officials and personnel from EIP were often on emails together, and CISA’s personnel had access to EIP’s tickets through an internal messaging system, Jira, which EIP used to flag and report social media posts to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. And CISA included a threatening disclaimer in its email. It stated that “information may also be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies.”
CISA was not supposed to have involvement in EIP’s flagging activities, but, notes the House Judiciary, numerous Jira tickets mention CISA, and CISA referenced EIP Jira codes when switchboarding. Stanford’s legal counsel insisted that EIP and SIO “did not provide any government agency… access to the Jira database,” but in one November 2020 email, SIO Director Alex Stamos told a Reddit employee, “It would be great if we could get somebody from Reddit on JIRA, just like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, CISA, EI-ISAC…” Stamos’s statement indicated that CISA had access to EIP’s Jira system.
In communications with social media platforms, the House report states, Stamos made it clear “that the EIP’s true purpose was to act as a censorship conduit for the federal government.” In an email to Nextdoor, Stamos wrote that EIP would “provide a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for us to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms if necessary.”
Anyone who doubts that the DHS-authorized organizations, SIO chief among them, need only look at the “Internal Workflow” graphic in a VP proposal obtained earlier this week through a FOIA request by Taibbi. It shows how disinformation "Incidents are routed to platform partners... for... takedowns."
“Psychological and influence operations have long been used to secure military objectives,” noted my colleague, Alex Gutentag, last week. “We now have clear evidence that, with the creation of CTIL and its partnership with CISA, [the censorship leaders] pioneered the use of psychological strategies to combat populism at home by censoring information and narratives associated with populist discontent.” Today, the Defense Department and its contractors openly discuss the importance of “cognitive warfare,” not just “security,” aimed at the American people.
While I believe all of the above is transparently unconstitutional, there is the possibility that The Supreme Court will not rule against it after it hears the Missouri v Biden censorship lawsuit next year. Some justices may conclude that somehow the First Amendment does not cover the Internet or that governments outsourcing censorship to third-party “cut-outs” or front groups is justified even though the Supreme Court has called it “axiomatic” that the government cannot facilitate private parties violating the Constitution on its behalf. Still, other justices may claim that the First Amendment requires a very high bar for government coercion of private actors, even though the First Amendment prohibits government limitations on freedom of speech broadly, not just through coercion.
As such, the importance of this DHS oversight committee in protecting our freedom of speech is essential.
Setting aside the clear and present threat that DHS poses to our first and most fundamental freedom, there is another problem related to DHS’s censorship activities, and that’s the ways in which it distracts from and thus undermines our nation’s cybersecurity.
As this committee knows well, the Internet is more essential than any other piece of America’s infrastructure because every major aspect of civilization depends upon it, including our electrical grids, our transportation networks, and our policing and security systems. If cyber-attacks take down or undermine the Internet, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Given that, does this committee believe it makes sense for the head of the DHS’s so-called “Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency,” CISA, to be involved in policing what people say, hear, and think?
Set aside for a moment the Orwellian aspects of CISA’s efforts at mind control. What do we think the consequences could be of CISA taking its eye off the cybersecurity ball so that it can crusade with Stanford interns against wrongthink? Should we be able to sleep soundly at night knowing that CISA is focused on the problem of people being wrong on the Internet rather than on China, Russia, Iran, and other malicious actors seeking to harm American businesses, government agencies, and our citizens?
Over the last 100 years, the Supreme Court created a tiny number of exceptions to the radical commitment to freedom of speech enshrined in our constitution. Nobody questions the need for governments to fight fraud, child exploitation, and the immediate incitement of violence.
What’s at stake here is our fundamental freedom to express our views on controversial social and political issues without fear of government censorship. CISA drifted so far from its mission that it slid down the slipperiest slope in American political life.
I believe this dramatic situation requires the abolition of CISA. If it is doing good cybersecurity work, then it should be placed under the supervision of different leadership at a different agency free from the awful and unlawful behaviors of the last three years.
However, I am also a realist and recognize that guardrails may be all that can be imposed. If that is the direction in which this committee chooses to go, then I would encourage very bright lines between cyber security and “cognitive security.” While censorship advocates have tried to blur that line, it is, in reality, quite clear to everyone what constitutes security and what constitutes censorship.
Nonetheless, something must be done to make clear, in DHS-CISA’s mandate, that the agency recognizes the distinction and will never again transgress its mandate in violation of our Constitution.
The turning against the American people of counterterrorism tactics once reserved for foreign enemies should terrify all of us and inspire a clear statement that never again shall our military, intelligence, and law enforcement guardians engage in such a recklessly ideological and partisan “warfare” against civilians.
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