Journalist Michael Shellenberger slams American government's ties to censorship
One of the journalists involved with the Twitter Files spoke about the way the United States government uses organizations it funds or works with to have them censor content on its behalf.
Independent journalist, who reported on the Twitter Files, Michael Shellenberger slammed U.S. intelligence agencies, claiming they have turned some of their anti-terror practices onto the American people.
Shellenberger spoke on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast on Thursday about how the American government’s intelligence agencies have been coordinating with some of the biggest social media and political organizations. He noted that the consensus essentially switched from platforms like Twitter being run by progressive tech people to a "huge operation by U.S. government officials, U.S government contractors and all of these super sketchy NGO’s" that were "basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people."
"The U.S. government during the war on terror had waged disinformation campaigns, propaganda campaigns, and it became clear to us over time that the U.S. government had turned its propaganda and disinformation campaigns that it had been waging abroad, it turned them against the American people," Shellenberger said. "You just sort of get chills up your spine, and you were like ‘something seriously sinister is going on.’"
He recalled when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Rogan's podcast where he claimed the FBI had warned the company shortly before the release of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Zuckerberg said the company was warned of "some kind of dump" of information similar to "Russian propaganda in the 2016 election."
Journalist Michael Shellenberger speaks to podcast host Joe Rogan about censorship in America.
Shellenberger declared that this was "super suspicious" because "as everybody now knows, the FBI had Hunter Biden's laptop in December 2019."
Shellenberger admitted he also initially believed that the Hunter Biden scandal was based on misinformation. He also claimed that the Aspen Institute had a training earlier in the Summer of 2020 to ensure journalists were prepared to preemptively debunk or "pre-bunk" a misinformation campaign about Hunter Biden.
"Basically they are training or brainwashing all these journalists," he said. "I mean it's CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia foundation-the Wikipedia folks, all the networks, all of the social media companies all coming together to decide 'if something is leaked then we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it.'"
President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, step off Air Force One, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023, at Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in Syracuse, N.Y. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
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Shellenberger called out a Stanford report that stated that journalists should no longer write about leaked internal documents.
"It's this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where we are like the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked so-called hacked but leaked information," he said. "Here you have Stanford University, Aspen Institute saying ‘Oh no no. We should stop doing that. Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way instead we should focus on the person who leaked it.’"
He noted how both the Aspen Institute and Stanford receive some government funding, claiming the government is using organization to censor Americans on its behalf and bypass the First Amendment.
"We're talking about U.S. government-funded organizations. If the U.S. government is censoring information that's obviously a violation of First Amendment, but if the U.S. government is funding somebody else to censor information that's also a violation of the First Amendment. You can't indirectly-it's still a violation if you're funding somebody to demand censorship."
Former President Donald Trump told Columbia Journalism Review he had to fight off "unbelievably fake stories" during his presidency. By contrast, intelligence agencies and big tech companies have been accused of covering for Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
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Rogan said, "Obviously the Hunter Biden laptop would harm Joe Biden and if that story got out, who knows how many people would have voted the other way," and went on to ask how the "Deep State" national security apparatus decide to help Biden rather than Trump.
Shellenberger claimed that Trump "terrified the Deep state and the National Security establishment," later noting that they saw Trump as an "existential threat to this post-war liberal order."