"Twitter is the place to find real-time, reliable information about the 2022 midterms  — whether you're looking for breaking news from reporters, information on voting, or policy positions from candidates. We aim to enable healthy civic conversation on Twitter, while ensuring people have the context they need to make informed decisions about content they encounter. Because we're a global service, there's almost always an election happening on Twitter."

—Twitter Inc., 2022

Truth does indeed often hide in plain sight.  Prior to the 2022 election, Twitter's online mission statement boasted that elections happen "on Twitter."  True enough, as it turned out.  The same might be said of all the other social platforms if Elon Musk ever gets his hands on those other partisan internet bordellos in some halcyon future.

The real value of all those Twitter email dumps so far is that we now have probative evidence for what many already knew — old news for the insightful.  Silicon Valley is a subsidiary of the D.C. political swamp, two ethical wastelands populated by tenured partisans.

The path to electoral victory today has little to do with vote tallies and a lot more to do with how well you "prebunk" (AKA cook) the electorate. With enough prebunking, you can run for office from your basement and skip the hazards of the debate stage.

Official prebunking is the cyber or internet version of "cutout" operations.  Cutouts are Intelligence Community tools and tactics that allow agencies like the CIA, NSA, and FBI to perform dirty tricks, sordid or criminal operations, at home that might otherwise be illegal or embarrassing.  Using a cutout, like Twitter or Facebook, allows government agencies and dirty cops at agencies like the NSA and FBI to have "plausible deniability."

If the facts surrounding the 2016 "Russiagate" operation ever come to light, Christopher Steele, Fiona Hill, and Alexander Vindman will probably emerge as animate examples of probative contemporary human cutouts.

Since 2016, nearly 100 FBI agents, under the guise of national security, have been working with Twitter to cook news and censor or otherwise prebunk (that is, spin) elections.  It's a safe bet that similar numbers of Intelligence Community curators are working across Silicon Valley with every internet platform to shape public opinion and elections.

For Deep State creeps, the best backdoor is an open door.

You might ask yourself what's in it for Silicon Valley, another obvious truth hiding in plain sight.  Uncle Sam provides laissez-faire, zero commercial regulation of the internet, in return for back door access — a kind of mutually agreeable political sodomy, which pretty much guarantees, among other things, that the party in power stays in power.

Unfortunately, a naïve and passive voting public must play the catamite in this political burlesque.  Who gets buggered every November, especially in urban sinecures, should never be a mystery, either.

Dirty tricks used to be reserved for foreign operations and regime changes abroad.  Now similar tactics have come home to roost inside the Beltway.  A partisan Intelligence Community now uses cutouts to control domestic American political speech under false flags like security, democracy, and defense.

The FBI director protects the American vote in the same way that producers, like Harvey Weinstein, protect Hollywood bimbos.  Thus, players like Jack Dorsey and James Clapper can go before Congress and get away with claiming that the NSA does not spy on Americans and Twitter does not censor or curate.

If you do the math, partisan narrative control is pretty much a done deal.  Silicon Valley, the legacy press, the Intelligence Community, and the Academy are now the four horsemen of the American apocalypse.

Indeed, the only media outlets reporting on the Twitter files are Fox, the NY Post, and occasionally the Wall Street Journal.  Fake news is not just what you report, but also what you refuse to report.  Silicon Valley and legacy media have not just a thumb on the political scales; they use their feet.  And if you think Republicans are about to change the game, think again.  Eight of top ten pork packages pending in the 2022 Omnibus Spending Bill are sponsored by Republicans.  And team McConnell/McCarthy, two tenured Beltway castratos, are unlikely to lead any reformers in Silicon Valley or out of the D.C. swamp.

The real business of Washington, D.C. is business as usual.

Withal, 21st-century politics makes for strange bedfellows.  Elon Musk was once the most admired African-American in the country: patron saint of electronic currency and the green automobile — indeed, a SpaceX visionary.  Alas, Elon ran afoul of the thought police when he got out of his lane with all that Twitter political transparency.  Musk has now been demoted to public enemy number two after Donald Trump, another D.C. outsider who ran afoul of the Creep State.

Elon Musk paid $42 billion for truth at Twitter.  Alas, Uncle Sam has an annual budget of trillions to craft any narrative it likes.  And truth, like it or not, is now any Beltway swamp gas that you are willing to inhale.

Like Trump, Musk has chosen the "road not taken," and that route is perilous indeed.  They are coming for you next, Elon.  Such are the wages of truth in America these days.

No surprise, then, to hear that the Intelligence Community and the FBI deny that they censor news or selectively enforce the law.  The FBI doesn't just think it is above the law; it now knows it.

The first great tragedy of the 21st century is the soft coup against America, a joint venture between Big Tech and Big Intel, where tactics and operations formerly reserved for foreign enemies are now used against American citizens.

G. Murphy Donovan is a former intelligence officer, former chief of the USAF Intelligence Research Division at NSA.  Now retired, Donovan writes about the politics of national security.

Image via Max Pixel.