Blockbuster Report: Homeland Security Colluding With Social Media To Silence Americans
An amazing investigative report from The Intercept has brought "the receipts" proving the deep - and corrupt - relationship between the US Department of Homeland Security and social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Government agents actually had special access to directly request takedowns of any posts at odds with Biden Administration policy on a range of issues from Covid to Afghanistan to Ukraine. Will the next Congress investigate this shocking attack on the First Amendment?
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel Mick Adams, our co-host, Daniel.
Welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
I'm doing okay.
I'm glad to see you.
You know, we have one member absent today.
Sircon had some problems and business to take care of, and then we got drenched overnight.
But I don't think anybody's going to complain.
We've been pretty dry.
But I wondered about it on my way over whether the roof, our tin roof would put us out of business.
But right now, things seem to be pretty good.
So we can get into it and get some information out here and update some people and some ideas.
But there's interesting things going on.
There's been some documents released.
It's on a subject that we know a little bit about and we've talked about, but evidently there's proof positive.
They can't call us making these stories up.
And that has to do with the corporatism leaning toward fascism happening in this country.
And that means how does private companies, and we're talking right now about social media, how do they get along with the government so well?
And, you know, this is a notorious type of problem we've had.
And it has bothered me and other libertarians less so now because I think we're on to exactly how they're doing it because, you know, we want to respect private property.
We don't want somebody coming in.
We have our churches to go to, our private schools to go to.
We have our programs.
People just can't come in and close us down.
But in social media, it's a little bit different because as far as I'm concerned, they're in deep collusion.
And then there was evidence that had come out a little while ago of exactly what they were doing.
But now I understand they have found documents that it's not this hearsay.
They don't just, you know, once in a while just imply, hey, get this guy.
We don't like him.
It was a program, a strategy.
I mean, it is really an ism and it's corporatism.
And it's also verging on fascism.
Something that we warned about and will further warn.
But we also see other signs that people are waking up and they're sick and tired of it.
And it's great to see some of those companies not doing so well financially.
So that evidently is a good way to handle some of those problems through the market.
Yeah, Dr. Paul, and it was an amazing investigative report.
And all credit goes to Ken Clippenstein and Lee Fang, two great investigative reporters for the intercepting that was picked up literally everywhere when it came out.
Because as you say, we've talked a lot about how the government tries to influence Twitter and Facebook and the other social media.
But these two investigative reporters dug into many things, including a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt.
And part of the discovery, I believe, gave the real extent to which we see that the U.S. government, in the particular form of the Department of Homeland Security, injected itself into social media to control the content.
And, you know, this takes us back, Dr. Paul, to the beginning of Homeland Security.
And I remember it very well, your statements at the time when you voted against it and you brought down a world of criticism on you.
You said, look, this is going to be turned inward toward us someday.
This is not about foreign attacks on us, but it's about controlling Americans.
This is exactly what it is.
And a couple of key takeaways, Dr. Paul, because this will sound familiar to you.
Remember a little while ago, a few months ago, the Department of Homeland Security said they're going to launch a disinformation governance board.
They were going to hire that kooky woman who herself was a practitioner of disinformation.
They were going to have her run it.
I think that may have been a limited hangout because everyone flipped out over that and they said, oh, okay, you got us.
We're not going to do that.
And so while in public, they said that in private, secretly, they did exactly that.
They launched that exact same program, but they had the collusion of the social media companies and they had direct control over what was said and not said on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere.
And what's interesting, Dr. Paul, finally is what they targeted.
They targeted what they called the Homeland Security Department under President Biden, what they called inaccurate information on the origins of COVID-19, the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.
So those are the things that they controlled.
And it wasn't about accuracy, as we know now.
It was about controlling politically what was being said in the United States.
If that's not a violation of the Constitution, I don't know what is.
You know, the courts could have helped us out, but it wasn't conducive right now for them to do it because, you know, they literally lied about it.
When you think about what was going on from 2016 with that campaign, just think of all the harm done for the many people whose lives were destroyed.
But even more so with the domestic stuff when it was hitting the MDs, we're still reading about how many have suffered the consequences and how many kids have suffered the consequences of the illegality.
And yet it was really well organized between the government agents and the political people and using it for political purposes.
I would say that's probably high on their agenda.
One thing that was not high on an agenda for the lockdowns was the care of the patients, because just look at what's happened to so many of the children.
And in the course of events, there's been a lot of people who have suffered by bad medical treatment.
And that whole thing that was happening with this medical treatment, it was so disgusting that the fact that the people who were promoting this, they at least claim, I assume they were, which means that we're really totally naive or totally stupid.
But they said, oh, so many people that were way up high in enforcing all these regulations, they ended up getting COVID.
And so it was just a little bit crazy about that.
And you think, why did they do that?
Because I don't think that they were doing it.
Some of them did it because they wanted to be heroic and set an example.
That became disgusting.
So it's great when we can get some information of the collusion that goes on, the planning, whether it's in the military part, you see the big weapons industries.
And when you see the medical part of it, you see the pharmaceutical industry and then in the medicine, it really should upset a lot of people with what they have done to some of the very best researchers and doctors that stood their ground during the COVID lockdowns.
But let's just hope that this can be reversed.
But there's tremendous support and there's a lot of financial doings on these cases because it just turns out that, you know, I think the military industrial complex, they're doing pretty well.
Their stocks are up and they're making a little money.
What about the pharmaceutical?
Oh, they're doing pretty well too.
Oh, it has nothing to do with that.
Yeah, and it has nothing to do with politics.
Yeah, you know, and when you think of it, there were a lot of lies.
You know, we're not, we don't brag on Trump.
He's not our number one guy.
But I'll tell you what, he has suffered a lot more than anybody ever wants to admit, at least on the mainstream media.
Well, you know, the whole situation is even worse than we imagined.
And here's one key takeaway from the investigative report, Dr. Paul, which is that Facebook and Twitter, according to Lee Fang, and he posted the documents, Facebook and Twitter created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content.
The portals, along with NGO partners, used to censor a wide range of content, including obvious parody accounts and content disagreeing with government pandemic policy.
That means if you disagreed with the government, the government had a special sign-in to Facebook where they could directly go to Facebook and say, I want you to take this one down, take this one down, and take this one down.
And they complied with this, which is absolutely incredible.
It's probably the scandal of the century, I think.
And here's one quote that was dug up by these reporters, excuse me, from a text message.
And this is Microsoft executive who was a former DHS official.
That itself is something, Dr. Paul.
Matt Masterson said in a February text to a DHS Homeland Security director, quote, these platforms have got to get comfortable with government.
It's really interesting how hesitant they remain.
I mean, that should be the headline.
These guys have got to get comfortable with government.
We're going to log in and we're going to take down people who disagree with U.S. government policy, because that's what it's really all about.
Well, and I think where you have heard and had more information since Musk was involved, he is involved with Twitter, but that's going to continue because he's taken them on and it looks good.
And you think, well, you know, it's sort of a, for me, it's a mixed bag.
He's very wealthy, which is okay, but there's also this inflationary factor.
But most of the time, the inflationary factors in these monies bent usually never are designed to maybe help the average person.
Now, Musk is at least doing so far pretty darn well because he cares about, you know, the personal liberties of the people who have been abused with these companies.
So this is another breakthrough because I think we'll hear more about it.
And it's his, the Ministry of Truth that he had to attack.
They used hundreds and hundreds of people just stealing the liberties of the American people and harming them, playing political games and making more money.
And what did he reduce it to 15 people or something like that?
Because there's some things that Are legitimate in on what people can put up.
But this whole thing has been a farce, but they're catching on to it.
And it's one of the biggest challenges for me and a lot of others is separating the businessman and the private market from the government who becomes partners with the government.
It's like just think of the Pentagon.
How many billions of dollars?
We can't even audit the Pentagon.
Think about the Federal Reserve.
There are trillions and trillions of dollars involved.
We're not even allowed to audit them to find out what's going on.
So it's a system that's totally out of control, but guess what?
It's going to end because this is not perpetual.
They think it is, and they keep Mickey Moussing around, but eventually it's going to come down and we will have to deal with it.
And hopefully, we can contribute some very positive things when that time comes.
Yeah, it is an interesting story.
And we found ours on Zero Hedge that talks about how Musk took down the Ministry of Truth.
Now, Twitter, pre-Musk, is implicated in this collusion with government, which I think is certainly illegal and should result in some lawsuits and prosecutions and some people being fired from government.
We won't hold our breath, but you're right.
They had this what Zero Hedge terms the content moderation thought police.
Hundreds and hundreds of mid-level and lower-level people that have the access.
They can tap in to the keyboard, tap into a system where they can just simply moderate at will.
And I wonder if there's even any records kept as to who they lock out.
We talked yesterday about how they locked out Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most highly respected, prolific doctors in the United States, locked out of Twitter.
Hopefully he'll be back.
But he cut, as you say, the number of employees who can use the censorship tools of Twitter from hundreds down to just 15 people.
Escalating Russian Threat00:09:27
And I think he's probably doing this so they can kind of get a hold of it while they figure out where they're going to go ahead with it.
But I do think it is a good sign, especially when you're talking about going into the midterm elections, taking the invisible hand that controls what's being said, what you can say in this so-called public, you know, public discussion portal.
And I think it is very important and it's a positive move, but we need to find out more about the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security's involvement with these companies.
And I think some heads need to roll, including the director of Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security.
Well, let's hope so.
But, you know, we did see a little clip today also from our friend Dave de Camp having to do with a little bit more supervision and trying to find out exactly where our money and our weapons go, which is a big job.
But anything that can expose what's happening, you know, is worthwhile.
But I mean, I find it, you know, the report that Dave was talking about was that they're going to have more of Americans on the ground checking this and finding out what's going on.
And their concerns is, well, we don't want any of these weapons getting into the hands of the Russians.
It's the Russians that we have to deal with.
And I think, you know, it seems just really outlandish that they send these billions and billions of dollars worth.
And then, you know, when Rand wanted a little bit of supervision on weapons that they were voting for, nobody would even support it.
They just, they just, you know, let it go.
And they claim that sending weapons over to Ukraine is defending American Constitution and freedom and all that.
So it is a shame that that is what they're doing.
And one thing they said that they just must have been doing this all along, which I'm sure they have, but they said they were sort of sending the agents back in to check it.
But they admitted that there's already CIA agents back there, the whole web, the whole thing.
But they said they had to wait a little bit because of the security conditions.
So, you know, they're in the midst of a war.
We put 67, some people say 80 billion dollars over there.
And oh, we better not inspect anything.
But this, it might be insecure.
So when things get better, which is just, you know, it gets to be nonsense because, you know, compared to what, compared to what they ought to be doing, we ought not to be there.
We ought to just be out of there, save a lot of money, and save a lot of lives.
And probably, you know, if they go back to it, even just as back to 2014 and erase that nonsense, we wouldn't even be involved in this whole skirmish that's going on now.
And right now, it's escalating because now it's becoming known, even though people did know that we're actually having troops on the ground in there.
So that's that to me is a danger.
And that is always the problem that we have: the escalation, the accidents that can happen, the false flags, and all these things.
And before you know it, they keep escalating, escalating.
But the one thing now that we're starting to notice is that some of the American people are waking up and saying, you know, enough is enough.
We need to back off.
And yet at the same time, the votes don't reflect that because when they vote on more weaponry, they have another bill up there.
And I'm sure they will have no trouble passing another couple billion dollars.
Yeah, and this is the piece that we saw on anti-war.com.
It's called the U.S. Military is Conducting On-Site Weapons Inspection in Ukraine.
And it raises a few issues, Dr. Paul.
The first one, as you point out, is that these are boots on the ground.
These are American boots on the ground.
So they directly are in harm's way.
The question is: will that be served as a beachhead for further U.S. incursions into Ukraine and thereby serve as a tripwire for further NATO action in Ukraine?
This could be something like General Petraeus was talking about.
We need to send troops in there to get a safe zone.
And hopefully, this is not part of that because that would be a very, very foolish escalation.
But the other thing you're talking about is absolutely correct.
And this is the issue of proliferation.
Senator Paul brought it up when they first passed the $40 billion and said, can we at least take a look at where these weapons are going?
Nobody joined him on this.
They called him, you know, Putin's puppet.
They said he was an idiot for trying to do this.
Well, lo and behold, all of a sudden we're finding out that this is a problem.
And in fact, Finland, of all places, a very enthusiastic prospective NATO member, they did an investigation, which they found on Sunday.
They reported that they've seen signs that proliferation is happening.
And this is from their report.
Weapons shipped by various countries to Ukraine have also been found in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, and so on and so on.
So these weapons are getting to other places.
We know that there are some bad actors in the world and they're going to seek some of these weapons.
But I would say even at face value, the idea that they'll fall into Russian hands.
Well, the Russians have captured many, many, many of the weapons sent over there.
And obviously, you don't have to be a war hawk to understand that we don't want our potential adversaries being able to reverse engineer, A, the weapons that we've paid for because we're taxed to death to pay for these weapon systems.
And B, they could possibly counter some of them in case we ever do actually start being a defensive country rather than an offensive country.
So you don't want unnecessary proliferation.
You're going to have threats to civilian air travel from these shoulder-fired missiles if they proliferate.
You're going to give ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and these other bad actors a shot in the arm, great new American weapons, just like we did in Afghanistan, Dr. Paul, where we left behind billions and billions of dollars worth of weapons.
And of course, the Russians and Chinese came in and made friends with the Taliban.
So you can be sure that all this technology is being studied.
This is not what's supposed to be happening.
Very good.
You know, there are people in Europe right now that are getting cold feet.
They've gone along and have done what we tell them to do.
But there's people there that are going to have a cold winter and they're starting to think differently.
And they think that the resistance is starting to build.
And some of them knew about it, but now it's becoming very evident.
And I think that's good.
And I think that's to find out what happens, because I keep thinking that when they become aware of things, it's going to be a lot easier to resist.
But they are starting to resist.
But they get so locked in the dependency and the NATO stuff in the United Nations, but there's going to be a lot of suffering.
And that's why there's going to be problems.
But I keep thinking, why don't they look at this thing?
And why don't the Americans respond and say, you know, what would we be saying as American citizens, say, if we just just, yesterday, tomorrow, we find out somebody's doing this to us.
What if the Chinese really was doing this?
I mean, they would say, well, why do we do this to them?
Because when we retaliate, we don't want them to do that.
This whole thing, we just never look at it that way.
And they just think that we are the king of the hill.
And I think the biggest fallacy is that we're not.
And morally, we're not and shouldn't be.
Militarily, we're slipping.
And also, our Constitution, there's nothing that authorizes us to grab hold of this authority and power to dictate to the world.
And as we weaken, I think it's going to just bring that cataclysmic end to it and much more closer to what we have.
But I think it's a situation now that this looks like maybe a little escalation.
We know they've been doing it.
But I think the more the people know about it, but I always lament the fact that why don't they prevent it from happening with a different foreign policy?
Why do we have to wait 20 years of killing and just so many problems, whether it was Korea, Vietnam, the Far East wars, the Middle Ears, and Afghanistan, Syria, all these things, we do it.
And as long as somebody's making a buck and they have a maximum amount of control with our government, you know, it's going to continue.
Why We Keep Repeating History00:00:17
So I vote for The admission that we have bankruptcy and we have to tighten our belt and just come home.
That's a good idea, Dr. Paul.
I don't have anything that I could add to that, so I'll toss it back to you.