General

From Matt Taibbi’s email list

/1 Comment/in /by

Why it’s entirely reasonable to send in federal troops to enforce federal law.

Activism, Uncensored: A Return to ICE Protests in Illinois

ICE now has a fence outside its facility in suburban Chicago, but the demonstrations are intensifying

A note from Managing Editor Greg Collard:

Protests outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Ill., have intensified since the agency launched Operation Midway Blitz three weeks ago.

“This ICE operation will target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” says an ICE press release in announcing the operation.

Prizker said Monday that ICE’s immigration enforcement is a “pretext to deploy military troops” in the region, and warned that 100 military personnel are on their way.

“People of Illinois, we need your help. Get your cell phones out – record what you see. Put it on social media. Peacefully ask for badge numbers and identification. Speak up for your neighbors. We need to let the world know this is happening – and that we won’t stand for it,” Pritzer said in an X post.

Many of the protesters at Broadview are willing to do that, and much more. Demonstrations have included intense pounding on government vehicles while trying to block them and ICE officers. Ford Fischer of News2Share first documented these interactions in a video we posted last week. Ford returned to Broadview last weekend and found the protests to be larger, longer, and involve repeated firing of riot munitions from weapons that resemble paintball guns.

ZeroHedge: Doing work that Americans won’t do: Guyanese illegal making >$300k as school superintendent deported

/5 Comments/in /by

Democrats expressed “national outrage” after the ICE arrest of Ian Roberts, an illegal alien from Guyana who somehow became the Superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, the largest school district in Iowa. Roberts competed as an Olympic athlete and distance runner for Guyana 25 years ago, but this apparently didn’t help him escape immigration enforcement and his active warrants.

At the time of his arrest, Roberts was working as the Superintendent despite being an illegal alien with a final order of removal and no work authorization. He was caught with a firearm in his possession (which is illegal to carry for a non-citizen), as well as a hunting knife and $3000 cash. Roberts had previous warrants for weapons possession charges in February of 2020.

Democrats claim that these ICE arrests and Trump’s deportation policies are directly to blame for the now numerous shootings committed by leftist activists. In other words, conservatives who are enforcing constitutional immigration laws are to blame when leftists try to kill them.

During a targeted enforcement operation on Sept. 26, 2025, officers approached Roberts in his vehicle after identifying himself, but he sped away. Officers later discovered his vehicle abandoned near a wooded area. State Patrol assisted in locating the subject and he was taken into ICE custody.

“This suspect was arrested in possession of a loaded weapon in a vehicle provided by Des Moines Public Schools after fleeing federal law enforcement,” said ICE ERO St. Paul Field Office Director Sam Olson. “This should be a wake-up call for our communities to the great work that our officers are doing every day to remove public safety threats. How this illegal alien was hired without work authorization, a final order of removal, and a prior weapons charge is beyond comprehension and should alarm the parents of that school district.”

The arrest spurred a protest outside the federal courthouse in Des Moines.

In response to the arrest, protesters mobilized under what appears to be the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a radical leftist group linked to the Los Angeles riots and connected to Neville Roy Singham, a U.S. billionaire with reported ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and to extremist organizations that fuel division and civil chaos nationwide.

Video and images show professionally produced “Free Roberts” signs with PSL symbols, indicating the protest was likely artificial rather than organic. The activity aligns with the broader protest-industrial complex and appears linked to dark-money NGO networks backed by Singham.

Civil terrorism expert Jason Curtis Anderson of One City Rising comments on the story and provides readers with additional context about PSL’s protest involvement:

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is a core component of the Neville Roy Singham operation. Their #1 goal is to exploit the fault lines in our society, destabilizing the existing system, and induce the American population into supporting communism. 

The PSL is their political party, which runs people for office, and last year, ran Claudia De La Cruz for President, getting her on the ballot in 19 states. The PSL played a lead role in the nationwide campus encampments, but the wider Singham network also has their own network of educators. They are capturing the universities from the top down and bottom up. 

The PSL protesting on behalf of armed conman (and alleged illegal alien) Ian Roberts serves all of their agendas: 

  • It shows solidarity with people of color
  • It shows solidarity with illegal immigrants 
  • It attacks ICE (The most violent anti-ICE riots were in California and Texas, both led by the PSL) 
  • It gives them an excuse to create more social division and bloviate about how this is a fascist country 

Nobody in America should want a foreign national who was arrested with a loaded gun and $3k in cash around their kids. But for the PSL and the wider Singham network, they don’t want America to abide by laws, especially as it pertains to immigration. This event marked a new enforcement in this sector. A chess piece was taken off of the board, and they are angry about it. Capturing education is a huge part of Singham’s strategy, and while Ian Roberts was not ‘in network’ just yet, the Singham network has already made significant progress on developing a “network of educators” to help them carry out their goals. 

The Iowa Board of Educational Examiners issued Roberts a license to serve as Superintendent in the state in July 2023, according to Norris.

“There is new information that has been made public that we did not know, and we have not been able to verify,” Norris said.

Roberts entered the US on a student visa in 1999, on which he overstayed. He had no work order and was given a final order of removal by an immigration judge in May 2024 (under Joe Biden), according to the DHS statement.  Des Moines public school officials claim they were not aware of the order of removal.  The leftist sentiments and calls for “radical empathy” from those same officials suggest, however, that they were likely aware of his immigration status and hired him anyway.

Not surprising…

The arrest highlights the dark cloud of far-left ideology plaguing the U.S. school system and the unfortunate reality that many district officials enable the spread of woke propaganda in American education. It also underscores the Democrats’ doubling down on ignorance, showing more sympathy for criminals than for innocent citizens. Moreover, the arrest and subsequent protest mobilization reveal how Democrats and their radical leftist dark-money NGO networks mobilize force whenever their power is threatened, especially when one of their own is removed from a position of authority within Des Moines public schools. Remember: indoctrination and nation-killing policies often begin in classrooms — and Democrats used an illegal alien to spread toxic woke.

Mondoweiss: European recognition of a Palestinian state is not an act of solidarity but a betrayal of Palestinian liberation

/11 Comments/in /by
A Palestinian perspective on Israel and Western Europe. The writer clearly hates the European history of colonialism in the area and of course European support for Zionism.
Recent recognitions of a Palestinian state by several European countries are not acts of solidarity but a profound betrayal that undermines our struggle for liberation by legitimizing Zionism.
By
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends talks on Ukraine at a meeting hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace. (Photo: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons)
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends talks on Ukraine at a meeting hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace. (Photo: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons)

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” – Toni Morrison

The recognition of the State of Palestine is not a gesture of solidarity—it is my enemy. Most Palestinians disagree with a two-state solution, which is what all the recent moves to recognize a Palestinian state are contingent on. It is only the Palestinian Authority (PA) elite, who continue to subcontract the Israeli colonial regime, who embrace this recognition in order to fulfill their role in a sub-colonial project. They have accumulated wealth, status, and shallow control benefiting from neoliberal governance under military occupation, while internationally serving liberal imperialists who champion a two-state solution that unapologetically shrinks Palestine and grants Zionists more time to expand their settler-colonial project across historic Palestine.

Again, the recognition of the State of Palestine is not a gesture of solidarity—it is my enemy.

How deafening is the global silence in the face of the ongoing genocide, the brutal invasion of Gaza City, and the erasure of our core struggles—especially the right of return for refugees and Jerusalem. I write to assert our Palestinian right to define our own liberation. We must not allow French, Saudi, or other European powers—complicit in colonial histories and present inaction—to whitewash their failure to stop genocide with hollow gestures of recognition. Our liberation cannot be defined by those who have enabled our oppression.

I write to assert our Palestinian right to define our own liberation. Our liberation cannot be defined by those who have enabled our oppression.

This recognition does not halt colonization—it accelerates it. Hundreds of new military checkpoints and settlements continue to isolate Palestinians into increasingly besieged Bantustans. It is not a step toward justice but a maneuver of moral bankruptcy. It is legitimizing Zionism atop the ruins of my grandparents’ homes, from which they were ethnically cleansed in the Nakba in 1948 and now on top of our assassinated refugee camps in Gaza.

All refugees in Gaza share this history, alongside over 5.9 million Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA. And that’s only the official count—there are an estimated 1 to 1.5 million more Palestinians who remain unregistered and more. Will this recognition restore the right of return under Resolution 194 for all those refugees? Or will it once again undermine that right to serve Zionist interests and uphold Jewish supremacy over historic Palestine.

This recognition does not restore our homeland—it erases it. It sustains and legalizes the theft of Palestine, declaring Jewish supremacy victorious atop the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and over a million who have been imprisoned for resisting the Zionist colonial regime since 1948. It offers unconditional self-determination to Zionists settlers but conditional self-determination to the Palestinians and our school books. This humiliation deprives us from our political agency without putting any condition on Israel.

The latest recognition was especially insulting. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who not only supported but actively armed and participated in the genocide in Gaza, cited the 1917 Balfour Declaration with arrogant pride—affirming his unapologetic support for Jewish supremacy and the Israeli state. People cheer as if the native people of Palestine need recognition from their colonizers, who are currently committing genocide in Gaza and have carried out repeated brutal assaults over the years, with documented crimes against humanity.

These same institutions and states continue to support a live-streamed genocide, affirming their backing of the settler-colonial project daily—without studying the facts, without hesitation, and without even revisiting the original partition plan that granted over 43% of historic Palestine to the Zionist movement. After the Oslo Accords in 1993, some Fatah Party elites agreed to just 18% of historic Palestine. Today, with over 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem, the PA controls less than 10% of the land. Even in those areas, Israeli colonial forces retain the freedom to jail, bomb, and raid—stripping any notion of autonomy or sovereignty from our so-called statehood.

This is the logic of colonialism. Anyone who accepts it without interrogating history is either hypocritical or complicit—serving hegemonic interests that ultimately enable full Zionist liberation while denying Palestinian liberation, or offering only a partial, hollow version of it.

Yet people cheer for any form of state recognition. Most political parties in Europe support it without critical pause, failing to see how such recognition not only undermines Palestinian political rights but also destabilizes the region.

All generations of Palestinians know this truth: such recognition will not liberate us, restore our homeland, or offer reparations. It renders us invisible, inferiorized, and deepens our mistrust in an international community that seems united against our dreams. They do this without ever looking at the map—without acknowledging how settler colonialism has expanded relentlessly from 1948 to today. They ignore how Zionist forces have besieged us, stolen our natural resources, and demonized our existence in collusion with orientalist Western elites.

This recognition is not a step toward justice—it is an escape from responsibility, part of the ongoing genocide and the escalating Nakba. This is liberal bankruptcy masquerading as solidarity.

The world must pause and decolonize its thinking. We will not accept a sliver of our homeland so that European, Russian, and American settlers can enjoy the rest. This recognition is not a step toward justice—it is an escape from responsibility, part of the ongoing genocide and the escalating Nakba. It abducts everything Palestinian again, including our ability to dream of a different kind of liberation—one that could include Jewish people, but not at the expense of native dreams.

This is liberal bankruptcy masquerading as solidarity. It convinces the world that something is being done for Palestinians, when in reality, we are being punished, violated, and silenced—while imperialist mouths speak only for themselves.

This state recognition is the most hypocritical, egocentric, Eurocentric way of escaping moral responsibility while continuing to support the white Jewish settler colonial superiority in Palestine. I will never accept any recognition that legitimizes the Zionist Israeli colonial regime or whitewashes Western imperialist complicity—especially from the UK. This recognition is not a solution; it is a distraction from ending the genocide and settler colonialism. The UK, like all Western powers, will continue its arms trade with Israel and conduct business as usual—participating in our genocide without shame.

After more than 23 months of live-streamed genocide, the only meaningful response should be sanctioning Israel and ending its impunity.

After more than 23 months of live-streamed genocide, the only meaningful response should be sanctioning Israel and ending its impunity. Yet, while a number of Western countries discussed sanctioning Israel, and Spain which canceled a third arms deal with Israel, the absence of most European countries taking action reveals how deeply Zionism and right-wing Western politics are intertwined.

I also reject the notion that Western leaders have any right to decide for Palestinians whether Hamas should be involved in Palestine’s future. That is a Palestinian political decision. Yet Western imperialists—true to their nature—assume they know better than us, the indigenous people of Palestine. I am among the most critical voices of Hamas, but I recognize that it has political legitimacy and a voter base. It is the largest Palestinian political party and must be respected as such.

Western imperialists want us to accept Zionism and settler colonialism across all of historic Palestine. The real betrayal lies in accepting these terms without demanding concrete steps to end the genocide, recognize it, and sanction those responsible. That must be our first demand—otherwise, it dishonors the sacrifices of Palestinians in Gaza, 80% of whom are refugees.

Therefore recognition of Palestine is a colonial mirage. A two state solution is not only fiction but also was born dead and is not a path to collective liberation. True recognition begins with acknowledging genocide, sanctioning Israel, ending impunity, and dismantling the colonial structures that have dispossessed us for generations. Anything less is not recognition—it is surrender. And I, like many Palestinians, will never accept it.

Free speech is under attack—especially when it comes to Palestine.

From the censorship of student voices to the assassinations of journalists in Gaza, the cost of telling the truth about Palestine has never been higher. At Mondoweiss, we publish fearless reporting and critical analysis that others won’t touch—because we believe the public needs to know the truth about Palestine.

Leaked Memo Reveals FBI Deployed A Stunning 274 Agents On J6, Causing Internal Revolt

/2 Comments/in /by
  • The FBI deployed nearly 300 plainclothes agents to the US Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, in an effort that became so chaotic it caused an internal schism within the agency that led many rank-and-file at the bureau that core competencies had been lost to “wokeness,” and that employees had become “pawns in a political war,” according to an after-action report hidden from the public for over four years until it was obtained by Just the News. 

Anonymous complaints were sent to the after-action team by scores of FBI agents and other personnel – many from the bureau’s premier Washington field office (WFO) – detailing how agents were sent into a dangerous situation without proper safety equipment or even the ability to identify themselves as armed officers to other police agencies.

Most common among the complaints was that under former directors Chris Wray and just-indicted James Comey, the bureau had become infected with political bias and liberal ideology that treated the Trump-supporting Jan. 6 protesters much differently from Black Lives Matter rioters from the summer of 2020.

“The FBI should make clear to its personnel and the public that, despite its obvious political bias, it ultimately still takes its mission and priorities seriously,” wrote one employee. “It should equally and aggressively investigate criminal activity regardless of the offenders’ perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations; and it should equally and aggressively protect all Americans regardless of perceived race, political affiliations, or motivations.”

The agent suggested that leaders “identify viable exit options for FBI personnel who no longer feel it is legally or morally acceptable to support a federal law enforcement and intelligence agency motivated by political bias.”

Another agent suggested that the problem was widespread throughout the FBI.

“Currently, the US Attorneys office is dictating what it is that gets investigated. This is a dangerous precedent because we can barely get them to prosecute investigations that clearly meet thresholds needed for Federal prosecutions,” the agent wrote. “However, their willingness to conduct a search warrant on someone’s life for a misdemeanor seems ridiculous. It is unreasonable for the FBI to conduct investigations involving misdemeanor violations at a federal level… it is not our role.”

‘Hopelessly Broken’

Several employees directly mentioned the Washington Field Office (WFO) and its culture. “WFO is a hopelessly broken office that’s more concerned about wearing masks and recruiting preferred racial/sexual groups than catching actual bad guys,” wrote one worker.

“I wish you all would pay more attention to our safety than what type of masks we wear. If you are going to deploy us to a riot situation, then give us the proper damn safety equipment–helmet, face shield, protective clothing–and training!” wrote another.

In total, the after-action feedback spanned 50 pages, which were located by current FBI Director Kash Patel’s office and turned over to the House Judiciary Committed and its subcommittee

As Just the News notes further; the document has proven a bombshell to lawmakers, revealing for the first time that the FBI had a total of 274 agents deployed to the Capitol in plainclothes and with guns but no clear safety gear of way to be recognized by other law enforcement agencies working in the chaos of the riot.

Wray, Patel’s predecessor, steadfastly refused to tell Congress how many if any agents went to the Capitol that day. And a prior DOJ Inspector General Report did not divulge the number, referring only to a SWAT team the bureau sent into the Capitol and having more than two dozen informants in the crowd.

The existence of mass FBI agents at the Capitol on Jan. 6  could also be a problem in many of the cases that were subsequently brought in court. If agents were witnesses at the Capitol and did not disclose it in the subsequent affidavits during prosecutions it could create grounds for defendants to appeal.

The document also reveals for the first time that there were widespread concerns for years inside the bureau – sentiments that boiled over after the FBI began sending SWAT teams to arrest Jan. 6 participants on misdemeanor charges – that the FBI had become biased in favor of liberals and against conservatives.

Despite the pre-existing report, Wray rejected that notion in testimony before Congress. “The idea that I’m biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background,” Wray told Congress in 2023.

“I have found almost invariably, the people screaming the loudest about the politicization of the FBI are themselves the most political, and more often than not, making claims of politicization to advance their own views or goals, and they often don’t know the facts or are choosing to ignore them,” Wray added in an episode of the podcast “FBI Retired Case File Review” that aired the same year.

Read the rest of the report here…

 

Sex Dungeon? Former Soros Fund Manager Arrested On Allegations Of ‘Sadistic Abuse’

/1 Comment/in /by

Sex Dungeon? Former Soros Fund Manager Arrested On Allegations Of ‘Sadistic Abuse’

A former New York financier who managed money for George Soros has been arrested on charges spanning bank fraud to sex trafficking.

Howard Rubin, 70, was taken into custody Friday morning at his home in Fairfield, Connecticut. According to a 10-count indictment unsealed in a Brooklyn federal court, Rubin is accused of sex-trafficking at least 10 women between 2009 and 2019 – luring them to various NYC hotels and a Manhattan penthouse with a soundproofed BDSM sex dungeon – where he restrained, beat, and shocked them with electricity, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn.

Rubin reportedly spent at least $1 million on said activities. He has also been charged with bank fraud related to false statements on financial documents during a civil lawsuit stemming from these activities.

“As alleged, the defendants used Rubin’s wealth to mislead and recruit women to engage in commercial sex acts, where Rubin then tortured women beyond their consent, causing lasting physical and/or psychological pain, in some cases physical injuries,” Brooklyn US Attorney Joseph Nocella said in a statement.

One of the West 57th Street penthouse bedrooms was soundproofed and painted red, and had a device that was used to shock or electrocute the women, the feds said. The room also had a cross and bed with restraints where the women would be bound and gagged, according to the authorities. -NY Post

Allegations against Rubin are not new, as he’s been on the radar since at least 2017. Among the alleged acts he paid $2,000 – $5,000 per session (via the NY Post);

  • Rubin gagged, tied up and viciously abused the women – even punching one in the head, according to a 2017 lawsuit filed on behalf of two Playboy Playmates and another alleged victim.

“I’m going to rape you like I rape my daughter,” he reportedly shouted during one of the alleged assaults.

  • In one session, he beat one of the women’s “breasts so badly that her right implant flipped.”
  • One plaintiff was tied up, gagged and shocked with a cattle prod in her groin before Rubin allegedly raped her

Some of the women agreed to a safe word – that Rubin allegedly ignored. Others were gagged so they couldn’t object, and prosecutors say he would even continue if a woman passed out.

  • “I don’t care if she screams,” Rubin wrote one of two women who he said he planed to “abuse” for hours, the feds allege.

Rubin also reportedly referenced Disney movies (like Jes Staley with Epstein), telling another alleged victim that rape was natural – referencing “Beauty and the Beast” (though in the movie Belle was clearly ready to have sex with Beast before he turned back into a human).

From 2009–2019; Rubin initially used luxury Manhattan hotels, then a leased the ‘sex dungeon’ penthouse. There were also encounters in Las Vegas.

Personal Assistant

According to the indictment, Rubin’s personal assistant – Jennifer Powers, is also facing sex-trafficking charges tied to her boss’s proclivities. Powers Assisted Rubin from 2011–2019. Her role allegedly included recruiting women (often former Playboy models via social media or prostitution networks), arranging flights and accommodations (e.g., to New York airports in Queens), securing NDAs, procuring BDSM equipment, managing payments (sometimes structured to avoid $10,000 thresholds), and handling complaints/injuries (e.g., advising ice or bruise cream, minimizing Rubin’s behavior). Rubin funded her lifestyle – some $8 million from 2018–2023 – including rent, schooling, legal fees, and a Texas home mortgage he co-signed.

In one text exchange, Rubin allegedly texted Powers that he had a woman tied to his cross, to which Powers replied “I can only imagine what you did to her on that cross!!! Did you shock her p—y??”

Rubin reportedly replied that he did, but complained that his electrocution device was “losing strength.”

Bank Fraud

On June 3, 2020, Rubin emailed a signed financial statement to co-sign Powers’ mortgage, answering “No” to “Are you a party to any suit or unsatisfied judgments?” despite the ongoing Civil Case brought by the Playmates.

Then on April 4, 2022, Powers emailed a renewed statement signed by Rubin which also did not disclose the lawsuit.

Here’s lookin’ at you Howard, you (allegedly) sick fuck.

*  *  *

Matt Taibbi: No, Things Aren’t Worse Now on Speech. It’s Not Even Close

/3 Comments/in /by

No, Things Aren’t Worse Now on Speech. It’s Not Even Close

As Google becomes the latest company to admit to mass censorship, the mania over Jimmy Kimmel has morphed into a grotesque propaganda campaign

Google this week sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee:

Senior Biden administration officials, including White House officials, conducted, repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.

While the company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden administration officials continued to press the company to remove non-violative user generated content as online platforms, including Alphabet grappled. With these decisions, the administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.

It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden administration, attempts to dictate how the company moderates content, and the company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds.

Along with the Twitter Files and Mark Zuckerberg’s admission about Biden officials who would “scream” or “curse” about removing content, the Google letter caps the trifecta of major Internet platforms who’ve admitted to partnering with the government in systematic censorship in the pre-Trump period.

YouTube removed thousands of people from its platform at the government’s behest during the pandemic. Tens of thousands more were deamplified or labeled, often incorrectly. Even before letters like the one above, this was no secret. When reporters like me called to ask YouTube, Meta, or Twitter why this or that person had been sanctioned during the pandemic, they told us flat-out they were following parameters laid out by government. Google announced this publicly, in statements like:

Prevention misinformation: We do not allow content that promotes information that contradicts health authority guidance on the prevention or transmission of specific health conditions, or on the safety, efficacy or ingredients of currently approved and administered vaccines.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter didn’t just suppress information that contradicted “health authority guidance,” information which incidentally was often true (as in the cases of people like Jay Bhattacharya, Alex Berenson, and Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff). They made conscious decisions to leave up government misinformation. While YouTube was removing critics of the vaccine, it was leaving up a CNN Town Hall featuring President Biden saying that if you get the shot, “you’re not going to die”:

Before this year there were entire federal bureaucracies devoted to policing speech, from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force to the White House Office of Digital Strategy. State agencies also partnered with “private” NGOs (often, funded by government) to create secondary bureaucracies charged with policing speech, like the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory, which denied making content recommendations until forced to turn over documents showing they did just that. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security were having monthly (in some cases weekly) meetings with upwards of two dozen Internet companies, funneling “guidance” on content on a range of topics, from Covid to Russia to Iran to “U.S. Elections.” Like a parolee, Facebook had to send a “bi-weekly Covid content report” to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Whether you blame this on the administration of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or the first term of Donald Trump (during which some of these bodies flourished), it’s now undeniable that federal pressure or “jawboning” to suppress dissent was systematic long before Jimmy Kimmel got a few days off.

How did politicians and the U.S. media respond to confirmation that the last administration engaged in wholesale censorship not of one jerkwad talk show host, but the entire world? They pretended it didn’t happen:

Subscribed

The New York Times ran hundreds of stories about Covid-19 during the pandemic, including many that repeated inaccurate claims and remain uncorrected, along with countless editorials decrying Covid “misinformation” or reporting about an “onslaught” of “toxic” content. How much space did it give the Google announcement, which touched on all these things?

347 words.

From “YouTube to Reinstate Accounts Banned Over Content Related to the Pandemic and 2020 Election”:

YouTube will create a process to reinstate the accounts of content creators whose profiles were banned in recent years because they violated rules that limited misinformation about Covid-19 and the 2020 election.

This is an all-time example of burying the lede. Google couldn’t have been clearer that it was not only subject to “repeated and sustained” pressure, but that the pressure involved material that “did not violate its policies.” This was particularly shocking since as noted above, Google’s policies included the entire universe of things that might “contradict” official guidance.

What could possibly not violate Google’s broad policies but still fall afoul of the Biden administration? We know from other lawsuits and investigations that the Biden White House was upset about everything from a joke meme about future vaccine lawsuits to theories about lab-leak origin to a Tucker Carlson video that Facebook said didn’t violate its policies. The world is now losing its mind over one incident involving Brendan Carr that took place in public and ended with the “victim” back on air. The Biden White House “jawboned” Facebook into reducing by 50% the traffic to a cable segment by one of the country’s most-watched newscasters:

The Carlson video that was ripped at the time as “illogical conspiracy” wondered why the Biden government was saying, in April 2021, that you still need to wear a mask or socially distance, if the vaccines work. His was one of countless reports suppressed that were not violative and contained true information. Yet America’s paper of record in the lede of its thimble-sized recognition of a years-long censorship campaign focused on accounts “banned… because they violated rules that limited misinformation.” Yes, it acknowledged “non-violative” content below, but it’s become clear that papers like the Times and public figures are bending over backward to preserve the fiction that, yes, we censored, but we did it for the right reasons.

Representative Jim Clyburn in response to the Google news said it “wasn’t the same” as the Kimmel episode, because “it was a pandemic” and we couldn’t have “foolishness” and “misinformation” going on. (Note how CNN’s Abby Phillip swerves around the “non-violative” issue as well, audibling to a line about content the Biden administration “thought was disinformation.”) Meanwhile, Jake Tapper went on The Seth Myers Show and said the Jimmy Kimmel episode “was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime”:

We’ve now moved to the stage of the Jimmy Kimmel story beyond immediate outrage and legit opposition to rank propaganda. It’s unconscionable for Tapper to say this in the same week that Google admitted submitting to “repeated and sustained” government pressure during the pandemic, pressure that happened to thousands of people instead of one and lasted years instead of days.

The pandemic speech clampdown was exactly the reason the First Amendment exists. As James Madison put it when arguing against the Alien and Sedition Acts, the state can’t use “previous restraint” to prevent criticism of its policies, because in the American system, “the people, not the government, possess the absolute sovereignty.” The obscenity of Clyburn’s point of view is in the idea that the state not only has the right to meddle with the press, but with the conversations between private citizens, and not just within the United States.

The sheer scale of the last Administration’s ambitions was breathtaking in this respect, and it’s only through a few lucky breaks (and the work of politicians like Jim Jordan) that we even know about the extent of it. For Tapper, ostensibly a news person, to look beyond such a vast amount of organized misconduct to pronounce the Kimmel episode the Worst Thing Ever is nuts.

The Trump Administration hasn’t exactly been a standard-bearer for speech. From Trump’s executive order on antisemitism to a deportations policy I join groups like FIRE in opposing to Carr’s unsubtle move on Disney (which counts as jawboning even if it wasn’t the reason for Kimmel’s suspension), this administration has bared fangs at the First Amendment more than once.

Even people who should know better, though, including some who were censored, seem to have forgotten what we escaped. What Google admitted to with regard to Covid, and what Meta and Twitter admitted to previously, represents the apotheosis of a decade-long effort to build a lavishly-funded, full-spectrum speech bureaucracy, whose vision included algorithmic “previous restraint” at the highest (e.g. Carlson) and most micro levels. That vision is in place in Europe, about which Google also complained (the Biden administration’s failure to help American companies resist laws like the Digital Services Act was another major offense). The hysteria over the Kimmel episode — Tapper’s CNN was breathlessly “counting down to Kimmel” before his return — has become a mechanism for burying that history. On speech, Trump just isn’t in the same universe as his predecessor, I suspect even Jake Tapper knows it, and the failure of people like him to admit it should worry anyone who cares about this issue.