(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) I love as much as anyone to see two deeply corrupt institutions—the FBI and Facebook—squirm over something that Joe Rogan helped achieve.
Such was the case following Big Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent admission on Thursday that the FBI knowingly pushed disinformation onto the social media giant that led Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election.
“I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us,” Zuckerberg offhandedly admitted on the Joe Rogan Experience.
Agents told “some folks on our team” that “‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert,’” said the man who had invested nearly half a billion dollars into two nonprofit “civic” organizations that proceeded to infiltrate local election offices and force them to rewrite their administrative procedures, including the use of unmanned ballot drop-offs that enabled massive illegal ballot harvesting.
“’There was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,‘” Zuckerberg claimed the FBI told him. “‘We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s going to be similar to that.’”
MISDIRECTION ON DISINFORMATION
The admission and its fallout on Friday forced both Facebook and the FBI to play defense, qualifying the comments and pointing fingers at one another.
The FBI released a statement Friday night acknowledging that it had issued “foreign threat indicators” but that it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received,” according to NBC News.
“The FBI routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats,” the statement said.
Facebook continued its efforts to stroll the media down the garden path by carping over the question of whether the FBI specifically brought up the laptop, which it says the agency did not.
As we've said, nothing about the Hunter Biden laptop story is new. Below is what Mark told Sen. Johnson in Oct 2020 and what Mark told Joe Rogan this week. The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference – nothing specific about Hunter Biden. https://t.co/pHtzvh6r0r
— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) August 26, 2022
But if we’re being honest, the indignation over this particular slip from Zuckerberg is a bit of a nothingburger because it falsely implies that Facebook itself was acting in good faith, which it was not.
Saying that the FBI never mentioned the laptop specifically to Facebook officials—and therefore both companies are absolved of any malfeasance—is to ignore every bit of context that suggests both were operating in bad faith to push falsehoods that would influence the election while maintaining a layer of plausible deniability.
CONFIRMATION [OF] BIAS
A general warning about disinformation was all Zuckerberg really needed as the pretense to begin his purge of any and all conservative content that might harm his half-a-billion-dollar investment in the Biden campaign.
The FBI was well aware of the fact that it needed only to plant the seed of doubt and allow the Establishment-friendly media organizations it approached to infer the rest, with little to no arm-wringing on their end.
In the backdrop of all this, of course, it also dispatched more than 50 corrupt former intel operatives—including such deep-state “luminaries” as John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden—to fecklessly push the lie about the laptop with a letter of their own that suggested it might be Russian propaganda while leaving themselves an exit ramp to disavow their claims.
Recruiting these lowlife political hacks to lead the charge gave their claim the imprimatur of the entire intel community without the culpability—a tactic that seems all too familiar at this point in the FBI’s recent history.
“We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it’s like very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” Zuckerberg told Rogan.
THE UNCOORDINATED CONSPIRACY
It is already well known that this is the Left’s modus operandi—using institutional power to work in tandem without ever needing to coordinate overtly on something that might violate the law because the wrong can’t be pinned on one person alone.
In a February 2021 victory lap, Time writer Molly Ball admitted as much, outlining the methods that a cabal of political operatives used to undermine our electoral system and manipulate the will of voters to effect the “proper outcome” by ousting the duly elected leader they didn’t like.
“Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” claimed Ian Bassin, a former White House deputy counsel for the Obama administration who co-founded the activist group Protect Democracy.
“But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally,” Bassin continued. “The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
Nonetheless, the net effect remains a gross violation of democracy, for which all of its treasonous co-conspirators should be held accountable.
Never were these institutions acting out of an abundance of caution for disinformation or the preservation of democratic norms—the end goal always was fishing for a reason to suppress the damning truth and to use any possible pretext to justify their partisan ends.
NOT SO INNOCENT
Tellingly, Zuckerberg offered Rogan a false analogy to explain how he, in hindsight, regards this egregious abuse of his platform now that the veil has been lifted.
“It sucks—though I think in the same way that probably having to go through a criminal trial but being proven innocent sucks,” he claimed.
The problem is that that’s not how our justice system operates. It relies on the assumption of innocent until proven guilty so that nobody should ever have to be “proven innocent.”
And likewise, it is not the role of a public forum like Facebook to begin assigning its own preemptive value judgments to the quality of information that others post on it, opening the gateway to false positives that undermine our cherished democratic principles of free speech.
But one thing that we can safely assume, now that these bad actors have been caught in commission of the crime, is that Facebook, the FBI, and all leftist institutions that supported the stolen election have now proven themselves guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers.
