Livestream begins at 10:38
by Glenn Greenwald
In this episode, we examine the implications of the Twitter Files reporting from Michael Shellenberger that has shed enormous light on how the FBI pressured, cajoled, and manipulated both Twitter and Facebook to censor The New York Post reporting on Joe Biden’s business activities in Ukraine and China in the two weeks leading up to the 2020 election. And we’ll speak to the journalist himself about these revelations, and what it tells us about how deeply ingrained the U.S. Security State has now become in the censorship regime of Big Tech and how devoted they now are to manipulating our politics and controlling the flow of information we receive.
We speak often about the U.S. Security State, but before World War II there was no such thing in the United States. Its creation is widely attributed to a 1947 law signed by President Harry Truman, the National Security Act, that radically transformed how the U.S. government functions. In the name of fighting the Soviet Union, with whom the U.S. had just allied to vanquished Nazi Germany, the law created a brand-new framework of highly secretive agencies that would be tasked with overseeing foreign intelligence operations and other covert paramilitary actions outside the purview of normal, transparent democratic channels. One of the agencies created by that law was the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
As many warned would happen during the debate on that law, these agencies, especially the CIA, quickly began operating almost as a parallel government, in total secrecy and beyond the control of elective leaders. The agency’s powers expanded rapidly and aggressively under the leadership of Allen Dulles, who assumed control in 1953 under Dwight Eisenhower and ran it for the next eight years until he was fired by John Kennedy, who blamed Dulles for the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco — the failed CIA invasion of Cuba. There is no doubt that Allen Dulles, his brother John Foster Dulles, simultaneously served as secretary of state, and was one of the two or three most powerful people in Washington, a completely unelected official very few Americans knew.
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