Julie Kelly provides a helpful guide in her American Greatness article What to Watch For In January 6 Report.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The omissions will be more telling about what really happened on January 6, 2021
than what’s actually in the report.

After several delays, the January 6 select committee will belatedly release the full findings of its 18-month “investigation” into the Capitol protest on Wednesday. Controversy over the contents of the final report led to infighting among staff. Strong-arming by lame duck Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who wanted to focus almost exclusively on the conduct of Donald Trump and omit criticism of law enforcement, prompted some investigators to quit the committee in protest.

Family quarrels were set aside just in time for Christmas. Committee members will gift the Biden regime and news media with a stocking stuffed with all things January 6—shiny toys for all the naughty girls and boys desperate to sustain outrage over a four-hour political disturbance that took place nearly two years ago. Visions of perp walks now dance in their heads.

The public, however, should brace for a blizzard of false accusations, cherry-picked quotes, uncorroborated testimony, and twisted interpretations of the law to substantiate the claim that Trump engineered an “insurrection” in a vain attempt to remain in office. And contrary to the first narrative that gripped regime mouthpieces—that the president incited the crowd with his speech at the Ellipse that afternoon—Trump’s “attempted coup,” as the committee describes the events of January 6, is now said to have been months in the making.

But like the drunk uncle at Christmas dinner, committee members had to spoil their own surprise gift (to the extent any exists in the report) by holding their last performance Monday to announce criminal referrals against Trump for insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy, and perjury.

Persuading the Department of Justice, now functioning under the ruse of an “independent” special counsel, to charge Trump won’t be too difficult. It will take a bit more heavy lifting to convince the American people that the wide-ranging investigation is a truth- and justice-seeking mission rather than an extension of the nonstop (now stretching over the better part of a decade) crusade to destroy Trump and everyone around him.

If early leaks about what to expect in the final report are accurate, Cheney got her way.

Seven of eight chapters will fixate on Trump’s role with little attention paid to how powerful federal and local agencies failed to prevent what happened. The last installment will give an “analysis of the attack on the Capitol,” according to Politico, contrary to early promises made by the committee.

So, what should thinking people look for in the pending report? Here is a partial list:

Identity of the pipe bomber:

The alleged discovery of two explosive devices outside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee just blocks from the Capitol—and, conveniently, about 15 minutes before the joint session convened—set off the first wave of panic on January 6. Investigators claimed the pipe bombs had been planted the night before; the FBI promised a full-fledged inquiry and offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

The story took a turn for the worse when prosecutors admitted in court that Kamala Harris had been inside the DNC building when police seized the device, which the FBI claimed was viable and lethal. Certainly, law enforcement would spare no resource in hunting down the perpetrator who could have assassinated a sitting U.S. senator and incoming vice president?

But that didn’t happen, and the case went cold quickly. General media interest also waned as reporters, including Revolver News’ Darren Beattie, raised troubling questions about aspects of the official story.

The January 6 select committee spent zero time exploring the potential mass casualty event during televised hearings; no witnesses or law enforcement officials publicly testified with an update into the investigation—including Steven D’Antuono, the former head of the Washington FBI field office who led the probe into the pipe bomber. He retired from the bureau on November 30 shortly after House Republicans included his name on a list of interviewees.

The role of the FBI:

Which leads to the next big question: Did the panel interrogate anyone at the FBI, including D’Antuono? Since the Justice Department, according to a Senate report, was the lead agency responsible for the federal response to January 6, how did the FBI miss all the warning signs that the committee pieced together?

The question is even more urgent with confirmation that the bureau embedded several informants in two so-called “militias” months before January 6. This should outrage committee members and lawmakers who insisted their lives were in danger that afternoon. Oddly, no one has expressed anger at FBI Director Christopher Wray for failing to protect Capitol grounds. Committee members have not condemned Wray for dropping the ball or demanded accountability.

To the contrary—when Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) twice asked Wray during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in November whether his agency planted informants disguised as Trump supporters inside the building before the breach on January 6, Wray was rescued from answering the question by Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the same Democrat who also chairs the January 6 committee.

And there is still no clarity from the FBI about whether informants engaged in or provoked violent behavior on January 6; when asked the question by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), FBI Executive Assistant Director Jill Sanborn refused to answer.

If committee members didn’t bother to interview Wray, D’Antuono and Sanborn or ask any official to explain the many failures related to January 6, the public—and congressional Republicans—should become even more wary about the FBI’s suspected behind-the-scenes role in fomenting what happened that day.

Ray Epps and other uncharged provocateurs:

In one of the weirdest spectacles of the past two years, committee members immediately jumped to the defense of Ray Epps, the ubiquitous January 6 protester who remains uncharged to this day. Reporters, social media influencers, and Republican lawmakers wondered aloud why Epps remained a free man more than a year later when so many others involved in less provocative behavior had been arrested.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) strangely branded the questions surrounding Epps a “conspiracy.” A committee spokesman issued a statement dismissing suspicions Epps was an FBI asset. “The Select Committee has interviewed Mr. Epps [who] informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any time.” After a year of describing J6ers as “insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists,” suddenly Epps was merely a “Jan. 6 protest attendee,” Kinzinger insisted.

Committee members promised to release Epps’ transcribed interview as part of the report—if it’s heavily redacted or omitted entirely, House Republicans should move to interview him next month.

Epps isn’t the only uncharged provocateur. As I wrote in November 2021, dozens of individuals wearing neon hats and tape have not been charged, either. Who were they?

Lack of security:

Despite open-source evidence that hundreds of thousands of Americans planned to attend Trump’s speech that day, local and federal law enforcement agencies did not order more officers on duty that day. Many Capitol protesters told me they had never before seen such a lack of police presence in the city—an inexplicable situation considering all the violent assaults by antifa and Black Lives Matter activists against Trump supporters throughout 2020 in Washington.

Will the committee report finally explain why the Capitol Police Board, the agency in charge of Capitol security, repeatedly denied requests for extra help? Will the document include records from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the top lawmakers tasked with keeping the grounds protected? What about correspondence between those offices, Capitol police, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, and the D.C. Metropolitan police department?

And what about Joe Maher, a longtime Cheney family friend who was head of the Department of Homeland Security office responsible for sharing threat information with law enforcement partners on January 6? Yahoo News recently reported that a DHS analyst alerted the office about an online plan detailing an “attack on the Capitol” but Maher did nothing with it. Maher, however, wasn’t fired for malfeasance—he was hired as an investigator for the committee by none other than Liz Cheney.

So . . . did Maher investigate himself?

Odds and Ends:

Will the committee authorize the full release of thousands of hours of video captured by security cameras on January 6? Will the public finally see all the text messages deleted by top Secret Service agents before and after January 6? Did the committee assemble excessive force investigations for police officers seen on video attacking protesters outside the building—including the unauthorized use of nonlethal munitions such as flashbangs? Did anyone interview Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol cop who shot and killed Ashli Babbitt? What about the deaths of three other Trump supporters that day? Did investigators obtain arrest records of those accused of carrying rifles around the capital that day?

The full report will be epic in size and scope. (A 160-page executive summary was released Monday afternoon.) But what isn’t in the report will be more telling about what really happened on January 6, 2021, than what’s actually in it.

 

Overview

France under the Ancien Régime (before the French Revolution) divided society into three estates: the First Estate (clergy); the Second Estate (nobility); and the Third Estate (commoners). The king was considered part of no estate.  In the 19th century, fourth estate came to refer exclusively to the press, and now it’s applied to all branches of the news media. 

In the United States, the term fourth estate is sometimes used to place the press alongside the three branches of government: legislative, executive and judicial. The fourth estate refers to the watchdog role of the press, one that is important to a functioning democracy.

The Fifth Estate is a socio-cultural reference to groupings of outlier viewpoints in contemporary society, and is most associated with bloggers, journalists publishing in non-mainstream media outlets, and the social media or “social license”.

As discussed below, the Fourth Estate has been corrupted,
suborned by political ideology,
while parts of the Fifth Estate have also lost their independence.

Rex Murphy writes at National Post The Hunter Biden story should make us think twice about censorship.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. and added images.

There’s a lesson for Canadians in the shocking Twitter Files revelations

You’ve been hearing a lot about misinformation from the present government. And disinformation, which is simply a respelling of the same word brought in by those pushing for censorship (they call it by a different name) to pump up their case that there’s a huge need for government oversight of all online information sources, particularly blogs, independent reporters and independent news agencies.

I think it is an axiom that the very last authority anybody wants to be deciding what is real or true news, and what is not, is a government. As it is also an axiom, or used to be, that the press and the government exist as opposed categories, that a democratic press in particular has a predominantly oppositional role to state authority.

It questions, tests, investigates and challenges. At least it used to. But that was a distant yesterday. Today the press, or what we may call the institutional or mainline press, is suffering a mighty loss of trust. Many major outlets are seen by the public, and in very many cases should so be seen, as having adopted partisan or ideological roles, reporting only what coincides with owners’ or editors’ or reporters’ own predispositions, party affiliations and personal biases.

The biggest story in the 2020 presidential race — let me rephrase that, what I think should have been the biggest story — was the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. The Post had obtained the contents of a forgotten laptop (it was left at a computer repair shop) that appeared to belong to Hunter Biden. It contained much salacious material. If anything comparable had shown up on a laptop belonging to Donald Trump Jr., the story would have been blasted on every television screen in America and treated to 24-hours-a-day coverage on National Public Radio.

The New York Post’s story, however headlined, was not the salacious stuff but the more significant news that — possibly — Hunter Biden had used his father’s influence to enrich himself in foreign business dealings. The online headline went: “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad.”

I have to skip a lot of details here. They are easily found. Now this story was near the end of the presidential election campaign. It had, if confirmed, the power to explode the race. But, almost instantly, it was smothered, ignored by all the big outlets, condemned as likely Russian disinformation. Since then, it is very important to record, the same outlets have verified that much of what the New York Post reported was correct.

The most egregious action was taken by the multibillion-dollar Twitter organization.
It disabled the New York Post’s account.

A useful summary of what was involved comes in a recent column from Douglas Murray: The Post “dared to print information that was of public interest. It was information that exposed corruption on an extraordinary scale in what is now the first family. Not just the president’s son being paid to sit on the board of a Ukrainian energy company when he had no knowledge of energy or Ukraine. But things like the almost $5 million that Hunter and his Uncle James raked in over 14 months from just one Chinese energy conglomerate.”

That’s what Twitter, joined by Facebook, suppressed and actively censored. It closed down a whole newspaper’s feed and labelled it as misinformation — as well as closing down the account of the White House press secretary. And the most smug outlet of all, NPR, at the time, had the gall to publish this prissy dismissal from its public editor: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Need I add that later, much later, well after the election, pious NPR issued a “correction” to an online article that had falsely asserted U.S. intelligence had discredited the laptop story.

Jump ahead to today. Thanks to the Elon Musk takeover, the machinations of Twitter, its manipulations and biases, its patrolling of accounts, its secret monitoring, shadow-banning or full shutdown of conservative viewpoints, is now clear and utterly undeniable. And scandalous in the full sense.

This revelation is itself huge news. It reveals the lie behind the drive to oversee the internet under the guise of protecting the public from misinformation. Because in addition to Twitter doing its own censoring, it also established contact with U.S. government and political actors. It was one big circle. Big government and big tech in collusion.

And, just to note the obvious: while the New York Post was being censored, you could hunt Canadian outlets — say the CBC — for news and reaction and find nothing. Should it have been Donald Trump Jr. involved, the panels and pundits would still be talking about it. Also, check Canadian outlets today for how much coverage this Twitter scandal gets.

Here’s a clue: when authorities talk about misinformation, they are spreading misinformation. And when the “most transparent administration in Canadian history” (just who was in that $6,000-a-night hotel room? Still waiting …) talks about “protecting the public” from misinformation, well, you have a choice: either laugh or cry.

Footnote: 

Liberals cite privacy laws when asked which media outlets got its $600M bailout.

The Trudeau government is citing confidentiality and “taxpayer information” to hide from the public which legacy media companies accepted money from its $600 million media bailout.

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the Revenue Agency withheld the details of the cash payments in response to an Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons.

Very few federal payments to media have been disclosed since the bailout was first crafted. 

Critics of the bailout including CWA Canada president Martin O’Hanlon called the program “heavily skewed” toward favoured papers.

“This is skewed heavily in favour of entrenched newspapers and their managers,” said O’Hanlon. “If this was supposed to be open and transparent, I don’t think that happened here. They chose the people they wanted to get the answers they wanted.”

More from American Thinker

Stick a fork in Canada

At this point, media companies become nothing more than state media outlets, mouthpieces of government, akin to Pravda or the Korean Central News Agency. They have abandoned all pretense of objectivity, neutrality, and “journalistic ethics” and simply voluntarily opted to be the propaganda arm of a political party. In Canada’s case, it’s the Liberal Party — in America’s, the Democrat party.

In days of yore, the Fourth Estate claimed that its job was to “speak truth to power.” Today, it is happy suckling on the government’s teat while hiding the truth from everyone still naïve or dumb enough to believe it.

Incredibly, in 2019, Canuck prime minister Justin Trudeau made an election-year promise that the Liberals would give the nation’s legacy media $595 million in federal assistance over four years. (And he won, proving that far too many Canadians’ brains are permanently frozen.) So much for a “free press.” And this is a kind of “feedback loop,” with a propagandizing press preventing people from accessing and processing unbiased, accurate information. Separation of church and state? How about separation of media outlets and state when “liberals” are in power?

After prevailing in the election, the Trudeau government promptly amended Canada’s Income Tax Act to allow for 25-percent payroll rebates to news companies, a measure subsequently approved by the minister of revenue.

The beat rolls on.

Jordan Peterson recently spoke with Piers Morgan on this topic (and related matters) in the video above.  Below is a lightly edited abridged transcript for those who prefer reading. (PM is Piers Morgan and JP is Jordan Peterson).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

PM:  Jordan, it’s good to see you again. I was absolutely astonished (maybe I shouldn’t have been) by the reaction to our last interview worldwide. The sheer volume of people that watched the whole interview–the way the clips were disseminated on tick tock, on Facebook and on Twitter–it was a really interesting Insight actually into a whole world that doesn’t even involve conventional television anymore

JP: Well I’m still continually surprised about it but I think it shows that there’s really no way that Legacy TV in some real sense can compete with the absolutely wide open Frontier of online video distribution, where the cost is low and people can access it everywhere. It’s fundamentally the consequence of a Technological Revolution, and there’s all sorts of good things about that. And one of those would be the ability to widely disperse complex and sophisticated information, which YouTube has been particularly good at in the long form.

But it’s also problematic in that it produces all sorts of alterations and social behavior, and some of them very dangerous, many of which we’re only just beginning to understand.

PM: Right, Elon Musk has just bought Twitter and it’s creating a huge furor obviously, in many different ways. He’s admitted he’s going to do lots of things in the next few months and may get some wrong and have to try something else. And he’s going to try and work out a way of making a sustainable business model. But also he wants to bring back what he perceives to be genuine free speech on the platform. Is it possible Jordan, do you think that he can do that or are we now so entrenched in tribalism, particularly on social media that it’s almost impossible.

JP: Well you couldn’t have picked a better day to talk about this with me because I just got a paper sent to me by Jonathan Haidt. He didn’t write the paper but it’s published in a journal called Personality and Individual Differences. And it’s an examination of the personality traits associated with, let’s say, excessive and self-promoting internet usage. And if you don’t mind I’d like to read you a couple of the descriptions of what the people found, because it’s so absolutely spot on and relevant.

I don’t think we are descending into tribalism, but what’s happening in the virtualization of the world is enabling people who behave in a particular anti-social way in a self-aggrandizing and self-promoting anti-social way. I’ll just read you the descriptions that are taken directly from this paper. So it was an actual study of online Behavior.

Women characterized by high self-centered antagonism, neurotic narcissism, Machiavellian views Machiavellian tactics. So that’s manipulation, meanness, dis-inhibition, physical sadism and indirect sadism used Instagram for a longer time and more frequently than did men.

Honesty, humility and conscientiousness was associated with a shorter Facebook usage time

Women high in agenic extroversion, so that’s manipulative self-promotion and indirect sadism, used Facebook for a longer time and more frequently than men.

I’ve thought for a while that as we virtualize the world, we’re enabling the small percentage of people (it’s usually about three percent in general populations) who use manipulation and reputation savaging and denigration and self-promotion.

So the genuinely Psychopathic types dominate the social conversation and spew their poisonous and manipulative Venom into the public domain. And not only with no fear of being stopped and no inhibition, which is almost all applied socially but also being monetized and promoted by the people who run the social media channels.

Every society in history has had to contend with a small percentage of people
who will utilize all the benefits of society only for themselves.

They had to contend with the fact that those people if not brought under control can demolish the structure of the entire society. I think the polarization that we’re feeling is a consequence of their untrammeled expression online, Instagram, Facebook and in online comment forums like Twitter.

PM: That stuff you read out seemed to be gender specific to women but presumably also applies in other ways to men as well on social media

JP: Oh yes, I think the reason that it applied in this study in women is because Instagram involves heavy use of images. And there are reasons to assume because of that it attracts women who are directed towards short-term impulsive mating strategies, another sign of impulsive anti-social and Psychopathic Behavior.

I think you’d see the same thing in men. In fact I’ve been talking to psychologists, great psychologists to make sure that I’m on the right track about those who post repeatedly, say in online forums, especially in relationship to comments. And you certainly see that same pattern of sadism, machiavellianism psychopathy and narcissism characterizing with the Men who who are also incentivized to use what used to be classic female anti-social strategies to advance themselves in the reputational hierarchy.

PM: But the bottom line is: there is a small percentage of people generating a vast amount of noise.  What impact is that having on society, do you think?

JP: Well I think it it skews our perceptions of what normal people are like. We assume what we’re getting when you sample the world, when you’re walking through it, you you assume that you’re getting an unbiased representation of the things going on around you. And when you’re on an online platform and reading comments, you also think you’re seeing something like a sample of public opinion.

But it’s not you know. Because if 10 strangers came up you randomly in the street, then you’d have a bit of a sample of what people randomly think. But online behavior online isn’t random and the people who post aren’t aren’t precisely normal

I have been talking with Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge about this. And they might know more about it than anybody else in the world. It’s pretty clear to them that the people who are dominating online comment sections, and especially true of the people who post anonymously, and there’s other markers for for this sort of behavior as well. They dominate the political discourse

What’s happening in some sense is that we have a new form of pollution, that’s also corporate sponsored, and it’s pollution of the domain of public discourse.

The pollution occurs because the social media companies are either enabling or failing to control those known in the popular parlance as Trolls. But they’re not comical trolls you know, using derision in some cute way and and having their say in the Free Speech domain. They’re really poisonous individuals and they’re poisoning the entire domain.

PM: What can Elon Musk do about it, if you were advising him on this? I mean ironically at the moment you’re not on Twitter? Would you do you want to come back now that musk is in charge? Secondly what would you advise him to do about this issue of the trolls and so on?

JP: Well I’m going to be talking of precisely this to some of the political people over the next few weeks. I’ve discussed this with twangy and height to make sure that I’m not off on a personal tangent. The first thing I would say: There’s no excuse for including the anonymous posters with the real human beings. Social media platforms who have a certain reach, maybe a million subscribers, whatever figure is appropriate, should be required to implement known customer laws. And that the genuine verified human beings who are posting and are willing to abide by their words with their personal reputation should be put in one comment section. And then the online Anonymous cowardly narcissistic pathological troll demons who are polluting the public discourse should be put in a different comment section. So if you want to go to hell and visit the troll demons and see what they have. Dispute you can, but otherwise you can be among the normal human beings engaged in normal civil human discourse. That would separate the bloody Psychopaths from the bulk of decent normal people. You know 97 percent of people aren’t Psychopathic and so we are talking about a small minority here, but they have the upper hand.

Look it’s often the case that people in the industry that you’re in, and this would be true for politics and journalism, as well anything with a public face, are more likely to be extroverted and also more likely to be somewhat disagreeable. And those those personality traits can tilt you towards a style of callous exploitation. But there are other personality factors like conscientiousness that mediate against that. And so people who are hard-working and reliable, for example, aren’t parasitic in the same way that the classic psychopath would be.

So it’s complicated and it isn’t the case that extroversion and even a certain degree of disagreeableness in and of themselves are dangerous. But they lead like everybody’s led to Temptation in the direction that’s in accordance with their temperament. And the fact that you are a public-facing person and that you like that would tilt you in one direction of potential temptation.

But that’s not necessarily diagnostic. It probably is the case that politics and journalism and entertainment attract a disproportionate number of machiavellians and Psychopaths because of the of the status that goes along with those Enterprises. But it’s not diagnostic: it doesn’t mean that if you’re in that industry and you’ve had a long career that you are one. That’s also another marker for failure or for lack of psychopathy because in the normal world, Psychopaths exploit and they get a reputation for doing so quite quickly, and then people avoid them and stop working with them. So it doesn’t work over the medium to long run as a general rule.

PM: Jordan, let’s talk about Donald Trump. What is he is he a narcissist, a sociopath, a psychopath, all of those things, none of them?

JP: I don’t think he’s a psychopath because he’s been successful in repeated Enterprises over long periods of time, and he has a variety of people who are remain intensely loyal to him. Now he’s definitely extroverted to a very great degree, and he’s definitely disagreeable. So that gives him some of the traits that are associated with those personality features.

But from what I’ve been able to understand, he’s also very conscientious and hardworking, for example. So that’s a real mitigating factor. I think it’s very easy to demonize someone that you don’t approve of. Certainly Trump is being subject to more demonization than any political leader in the west that I can remember in my entire lifetime, including Richard Nixon.

So that’s also set him back on his heels and made him somewhat embattled and defensive, which I don’t think did any great things for for his personality.

So I think it’s a mistake to assume that that Trump is a psychopath. I think it’s a big mistake to assume that someone potent is a psychopath. T he evidence suggests that you don’t want to throw those labels around casually. And you know, how could it be Trump was Psychopathic, since he did a pretty good job of keeping the United States clear of War for four years. That’s pretty damn remarkable, and he did have a big hand in promoting the Abraham Peace Accords, also pretty remarkable.

Those aren’t the sorts of things that you would expect from the psychopath. He also seems to have a pretty good hand with the working class. So I I don’t think those are reasonable diagnostic labels to place on someone.

Whether or not Donald Trump should be president, it would be good for Americans to sort out in the public sphere debated intensely and subject to an election. It might be very interesting to see him put himself forward on the Republican ticket. If I had my druthers, and I say this I hope with due care, I would rather see someone like DeSantis step forward, who shares some of that forthright strength let’s say that characterizes Trump at his best. But seems to be a more cautious administrator and a less divisive figure. Because Trump, for whatever virtues he might have, and I think he has the virtues of a Washington Outsider, I think that his behavior in the political realm raises the political temperature to a dangerous degree.

PM: There’s somebody else who may well have presidential Ambitions and has been the subject of a lot of negativity: Meghan Markle. Prince Harry’s wife. She seems to perennially play the victim, the female victim of all outrages, and your name got dragged into this. Let’s take a listen to what she said.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been called crazy or hysterical. Or what about nuts, insane, out of your mind, completely irrational. I don’t think that men can control crazy women. The use of these labels has been drilled into us from movies and TV, from friends and family and even from random strangers.  And the fact is no one wants this label.

What did you make of that Jordan–to be suddenly appearing on Meghan Markle’s podcast as a villain?

JP: The first thing: I’m calling women crazy. Well the first thing I make of it is that her voice drips with the same falsehood as does the voice of Kamala Harris. It’s this sanctimonious, full compassionate talking down to her audience, and trying to be sure that we’re all really on the same compassionate page here. And we’re all being victimized by terrible forces that are arrayed against us. And none of that’s really fair.

You played a bit of a clip from me talking to Camille Paglia the literary critic. I do believe that it is very difficult to control female anti-social Behavior of the type that’s been pilloried as hysterical. And there is no shortage of clinical evidence to support precisely that. It’s very difficult for women to control female anti-social behavior. And females who are anti-social exhibit that feminine pattern of reputation savaging under the guise of Compassionate Care.

It’s extraordinarily destructive and so I stand by my words. And I do think it scales online because you can use an anonymous reputation savaging to unbelievably great effect online with absolutely no punishment for your sins so to speak. That is certainly one of the things that’s contributing to so-called Cancel Culture, and there’s no shortage of that coming from the female side.

Now men can engage in exactly the same strategies and they do so online and that’s enabled. It’s definitely seen with men which I’ve said before. And I do believe the ever-present threat of the potential for physical violence keeps men from doing that to each other most of the time in person.  But all that disappears online, which means that those who are prone to do such things: to use corrosive and denigrating derision, for example, and reputation savaging can have a free hand at it. And that includes no shortage of women. And women are very often the targets of that behavior from their own fellows so to speak.

PM: We’ve talked about Trump and Meghan Markle. I wanted to just ask you again about Elon Musk, what you thought of him as a character?

JP: Well I know people who know him very well and have worked with him very closely and these are very solid people; extremely competent and extremely creative and they’re admirers of Musk. I talked with my brother-in-law Jim Keller who’s one of the world’s great chip engineers and he worked very closely with Musk for years. He believes that in many ways Musk is exactly what you’d think he was. He’s a genius, a Visionary genius; but he’s also someone who’s very very good at implementing. He’s very good at running companies as you can tell because he has a multitude of impossibly successful companies. And so he goes into a company and he cleans house and puts things in order and makes things work efficiently.

Maybe he can do that with Twitter. I hope he can because Musk is doing all sorts of things that appear to be useful and difficult and it would be a catastrophe to see him derailed in his efforts. I dipped into Twitter this morning. It instantly struck me the same way I was struck the last time I was on Twitter. It’s such a den of pathology that I think using it is psychologically damaging. If it’s possible for Musk to get the the trolls under control (and they’re not trolls, they’re Psychopathic Machiavellian sadistic narcissists), then it’s possible that the platform might be useful. I like to share information and I like to follow people to see what they were up to; A lot of the people that I’ve met over the years. But man it’s a snake pit

PM: Should people be compelled to wear poppies for example, and I guess this goes to the wider thing about General displays of signaling your virtue in any way that you choose. Should anyone be compelled to whatever the cause whether it’s a black Square on Instagram when George Floyd died, or a poppy for Armistice Day or so on.

JP: I think that that compulsion especially in matters of public policy is a sign of bad policy. If you can’t get people on board voluntarily by motivating them with the proper story, then you’re a poor leader. So I certainly would be opposed to anything approximating legal compulsion. Now we use social compulsion frequently to produce consensus and to enforce it. that’s never going to go away and there’s some utility in that.

But my general take on the world Is that people should be allowed to go to hell in a hand basket pretty much any way they choose once they’re adults, although they might be encouraged not to do that and invited not to do that. But I’m not a fan of compulsion for any reason, it is a sign of bad policy. If you and I can’t play together voluntarily, then we don’t have a very good relationship and it’s not going to be efficient and productive forced to continue.

See also American Soviet Mentality

Americans have discovered the way in which fear of collective disapproval breeds self-censorship and silence, which impoverish public life and creative work. The double life one ends up leading—one where there is a growing gap between one’s public and private selves—eventually begins to feel oppressive. For a significant portion of Soviet intelligentsia (artists, doctors, scientists), the burden of leading this double life played an important role in their deciding to emigrate.

Those who join in the hounding face their own hazards. The more loyalty you pledge to a group that expects you to participate in rituals of collective demonization, the more it will ask of you and the more you, too, will feel controlled. How much of your own autonomy as a thinking, feeling person are you willing to sacrifice to the collective? What inner compromises are you willing to make for the sake of being part of the group? Which personal relationships are you willing to give up?

The practice of collective condemnation feels like an assertion of a culture that ultimately tramples on the individual and creates an oppressive society. Whether that society looks like Soviet Russia, or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Castro’s Cuba, or today’s China, or something uniquely 21st-century American, the failure of institutions and individuals to stand up to mob rule is no longer an option we can afford.

Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness Jen Psaki: Investigations for Thee, But Not for Me.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

It’s beyond ironic that the mouthpiece for a regime proceeding with yet another punitive and vengeful investigation into Donald Trump wants to be shielded from an inquiry into her own misdeeds.

Former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, much like her old boss, is a big fan of investigations.

From her perch at the podium in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, Psaki routinely endorsed criminal, civil, and congressional inquiries into the events of January 6 and warned the individuals targeted—including Donald Trump and his former aides—that they must comply with the legal process.

Psaki announced that Biden would not extend executive privilege to his predecessor related to the January 6 select committee’s inquisition, giving investigators carte blanche access to all of Trump’s records for most of 2020—most of which had nothing to do with January 6. “We are, we have been working closely with congressional committees and others as they work to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th, an incredibly dark day in our democracy,” Psaki said in September 2021.

And anyone who defied congressional subpoenas, Psaki noted, could face criminal charges.

But Psaki, unsurprisingly, is taking a different approach now that she’s a defendant in a sprawling civil lawsuit seeking to uncover the federal government’s deep collaboration with Big Tech to suppress free speech and promote Biden’s political interests.

Psaki is one of more than five dozen current and former federal officials—including Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy—being sued by the states of Missouri and Louisiana for violating the First Amendment rights of American citizens.

“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’” the complaint reads. “Under the First Amendment, the federal Government should play no role in policing private speech or picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas. But that is what federal officials are doing, on a massive scale—the full scope and impact of which yet to be determined.”

The lawsuit cited numerous occasions when Psaki gloated about the White House’s partnership with social media platforms to ban content contradictory to the official narrative on COVID-19 and vaccines. For example, during a July 2021 press briefing with Surgeon General Murthy, Psaki publicly urged Facebook to deplatform accounts she considered purveyors of “health misinformation,” an alleged scourge that Murthy described as an “urgent public health threat.” Psaki made her expectations quite clear.

“[We] engage with [social media companies] regularly and they certainly understand
what our asks are,” Psaki bragged.

A few days later, Facebook banned the accounts Psaki had accused of spreading “misinformation.”

Now all of a sudden, Psaki doesn’t want to boast about how she strong-armed
Silicon Valley to do the regime’s bidding—especially under oath.

Judge Terry Doughty from the western district of Louisiana last month ordered Psaki to sit for a deposition, finding that the ex-spokeswoman “has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to COVID-19 and ancillary issues of COVID-19.” Doughty further concluded that “any burden on Psaki is outweighed by the need to determine whether free speech has been suppressed.” On November 1, Psaki was served with a subpoena, ordering her to appear for a sworn deposition in Arlington, Virginia, near her home.

Psaki, however, doesn’t have time. The newly minted MSNBC contributor—Psaki is slated to host her own show on the network starting next year—is simply too swamped.

In a separate statement to the court, Psaki claimed that “sitting for a deposition in this matter would be extremely burdensome for me. Among other things, I understand that I would need to devote several days to preparing for the deposition, as well as attending the deposition itself, and that would be highly disruptive to both my work and my family.”

You don’t say!

Psaki’s interview also would create a big job for government lawyers who would need to determine “which of her conversations or recollections might be subject to executive privilege,” her legal team argued.

Setting aside the laughable hypocrisy of Psaki now invoking her status as a “private citizen” and “former senior official” when she offered no such consideration to Donald Trump, and further noting the hollowness of her complaints that a deposition would be far too time-consuming.  The notion is astonishing:  That somehow she is entitled to executive privilege, but a former president and his top aides including legal counsel are not.

Further, Psaki’s lawyers warned they will fight the production of “any Documents and Communications that relate to any member of the White House Communications Team or any other Federal Official communicating with Social-Media Platforms about Content on those Platforms.”

Funny how Psaki had no similar objection when she announced in October 2021 that the White House had ordered the transfer of thousands of Trump’s official records to the January 6 select committee.

Psaki’s lawyers attempted to bypass Judge Doughty. They filed a motion to quash the subpoena in the eastern district of Virginia, where Psaki lives and likely will sit for the deposition. But the Virginia judge wasn’t having any part of it, ordering the matter returned to the Louisiana court where the lawsuit originated.  In other words, the judge told Psaki to “circle back.”

It looks like Psaki has run out of options to avoid her scheduled
December 8 video-recorded deposition.

Which, by the way, Psaki wants under seal. Lawyers representing the eight officials ordered to be deposed asked Judge Doughty to issue a protective order on all recorded interviews, insisting that “civil servants—do not reasonably expect that they will be subjected to video-recorded, publicly disseminated cross-examination about the way that they carried out their job duties.”

Publicly releasing the videos, the lawyers said, creates a “significant likelihood that audiovisual recordings of federal employee depositions taken in this case will be manipulated or abused” and cherry-picked clips “will expose the deponents to undue harassment and invasions of privacy.”

Doughty partially granted their motion, sealing the taped depositions only until the interviews are docketed as discovery evidence before trial. “The public’s interest in access of this information is especially strong because this matter involves the [First] Amendment right to freedom of speech,” he wrote in a November 17 order.

It goes without saying—or should, at any rate—that a coordinated effort between the most powerful government officials and the most powerful information providers to silence and punish political dissent is a far greater “threat to democracy,” as they like to say, than what happened for a few hours on January 6.

And it’s beyond ironic that the mouthpiece for a regime proceeding with yet another punitive and vengeful investigation into Donald Trump wants to be shielded from an inquiry into her own misdeeds. Proof once again that accountability, transparency, and consequences only runs one way in Washington.

Background from previous post

Fed Govt./Big Tech Censorship Lawsuit Update: Senior Biden People Will Be Deposed

Zachary Stieber  reports at Epoch Times Judge Rejects Biden Administration’s Attempt to Block Depositions in Big Tech-Government Censorship Case.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, rejected a request for a partial stay of his Oct. 21 order authorizing the depositions of eight officials, including President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Government lawyers asked the judge to impose the partial stay as an appeals court weighs a request to vacate the part of his order that enables the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, a Biden appointee; Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, a Biden appointee; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to the president.

Absent a stay, “high-ranking governmental officials would be diverted from their significant duties and burdened in both preparing and sitting for a deposition, all of which may ultimately prove to be unnecessary if the Court of Appeals grants” their request, the government said.

Doughty ruled that the government failed to show how the officials would be irreparably harmed apart from referencing a diversion from “significant duties.” That didn’t meet the standard for showing irreparable harm, he said.

From the Judge’s MEMORANDUM ORDER

For the reasons set forth herein, Federal Defendants’ Corrected Motion for Partial Stay is DENIED. (Excerpts in italics with my bolds.)

1. Surgeon General Murthy

Details regarding the allegations as to Murthy are set forth in the Memorandum Order Regarding Witness Depositions. Murthy was found to have first-hand knowledge by (1) publicly criticizing tech companies by asserting they were responsible for COVID-19 deaths due to their failure to censor “mis-information”; (2) issuing a Request for Information on March 2, 2022, requesting tech companies to provide him with “mis-information”; and (3) engaging in communication with high-level Facebook executives about greater censorship of COVID-19 “misinformation.”

Although Murthy was a high-ranking official, the potential burden imposed on Murthy was outweighed by the need to determine whether First Amendment rights of free speech have been suppressed. The Court found exceptional circumstances were present and that the substantive reasons for taking the deposition were sufficient.

2. CISA Director Jen Easterly

Details of the allegations as they relate to Easterly are set forth in the Memorandum Order Regarding Witness Depositions.  Easterly was found to have first-hand knowledge by (1) supervising the “nerve center” of federally directed censorship; (2) directly flagging alleged “misinformation” to social media companies for censorship; (3) stating that social media speech by Americans is a form of infrastructure that allows the CISA to police online speech; (4) being involved in extensive oral communications and meetings between CISA officials and social-media platforms; and (5) being personally involved in text messages specifically discussing how greater censorship of social-media platforms would be done by exerting federal pressure on social-media platforms to increase censorship.

The Court also conducted its analysis of Easterly as if she were a high-ranking official and found that her personal knowledge required her deposition. The Court further found that the burden upon her was outweighed by the need to determine whether First Amendment free speech rights are being suppressed. The Court found exceptional circumstances were present and that the substantive reasons for taking the deposition were sufficient.

3. White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty

Details of the allegations as to Flaherty are set forth in the Memorandum Order Regarding Witness Depositions. Flaherty was found to have first-hand knowledge by (1) having extensive oral meetings with social-media platforms including Twitter, Meta and You-Tube on vaccine hesitancy and combatting “mis-information”; (2) directly communicating with Meta’s director of U.S. Public Policy through “Covid Insight Reports” (which details trends/posts by social media users on Meta); (3) Meta’s reporting to Flaherty about Meta’s intentions to censor disfavored opinions about vaccine effectiveness for new groups for which vaccines were authorized; (4) having specific knowledge on Meta’s attempts to censor groups referred to by Flaherty as the “Disinformation Dozen”; and (5) being aware of the President-Elect-Joe Biden transition team’s efforts to stifle “mis-information” through Meta.

The Court also assumed that Flaherty was a high-ranking official and conducted its analysis
as such. It found special circumstances were present to take his deposition. The Court further found the burden upon Flaherty was outweighed by the need to determine whether First Amendment free speech rights are being suppressed; therefore, the substantive reasons for taking his deposition were sufficient.

For the reasons set forth herein, the Court also finds Federal Defendants are not likely to
succeed on the merits of their mandamus petition.

Background from previous post: Fed Govt./Big Tech Censorship Lawsuit: 47 New Biden People Added

Zachary Stieber writes at Epoch Times 47 New Biden Administration Defendants Named in Government–Big Tech Censorship Lawsuit.  Excerpts in italic with my bolds.

Nearly 50 new government defendants have been added to the lawsuit that alleges the government induced censorship of state officials and others on social media.

The second amended complaint in the case, Missouri v. Biden, includes six new agencies, bringing the total to 13, and 41 new individual defendants, bringing the total to 54.

Altogether, 67 officials or agencies are accused of violating plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by participating in a “censorship enterprise” through pressuring Big Tech firms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to take action against users offering alleged misinformation.

Evidence backing the claims has been produced in discovery, including exchanges between White House officials and Meta, Facebook’s parent company and messages showing meetings between administration officials and the firms.

The new defendants include the FBI; former White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andrew Slavitt; Dana Remus, counsel to President Joe Biden; Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent based in San Francisco; Janell Muhammed, deputy digital director at the Department of Health and Human Services; Allison Snell, an official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the State Department; and Mark Robbins, interim executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

One or more of the Big Tech firms that were subpoenaed in the case identified the officials as possibly communicating with them on content moderation relating to “COVID-19 misinformation,” the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the administration’s since-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, and/or “election security, integrity, outcomes, and/or public confidence in election outcomes (not to include issues of foreign interference or related issues).”

Slavitt was named because emails show he was in communication with Facebook regarding the combating of alleged misinformation. The messages show that Facebook was committed to censoring and de-emphasizing posts that were “departing from the government’s messaging on vaccines,” plaintiffs said. Slavitt also called for Twitter to ban Alex Berenson, an independent journalist, previously released messages show.

Muhammed, meanwhile, was in touch with Facebook to ask the company to take down pages and accounts that were allegedly misrepresenting themselves as representing the government. “Absolutely,” one of the Facebook employees responded.

Other discovery suggests the FDA “has participated in federally-induced censorship of private speech on social media about questions of vaccine safety and efficacy, among other subjects,” plaintiffs said.

The agencies that were added to the case did not respond to requests for comment.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee overseeing the case, recently ordered defendants named in earlier complaints to comply with demands, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top medical adviser to Biden. The new documents do not include any more information from Fauci or the White House press secretary’s office.

Footnote: 

From Your news: Biden Admin Showered Millions On Government’s ‘Misinformation’ Czars After 2020 Election

The four groups in question – Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika – comprise the “Election Integrity Partnership,” which exists as a ‘concierge-like’ service for federal agencies such as Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to flag online content for censorship or monitoring by Big Tech using a “ticket” system.

Unsurprisingly, the head of Stanford’s Internet Observatory is a Clinton donor who previously served as Facebook’s Head of Security – while the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public is largely funded by the Knight Foundation, whose board exclusively contributes to Democrat or Neocon entities. 

Meanwhile, the Biden administration empowered three liberal groups to file tickets seeking censorship; the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP.

https://twitter.com/katestarbird/status/1556289862973632515

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