The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reconvened Thursday after four long months (full of weaponization) for more testimony from two of the authors recruited by Elon Musk to compile the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.  We’re already coming up on a year since the first of those blockbuster reports was released.

As you know from reports this week in the newsletter, the government has not let up one bit on efforts to work with “private” entities to monitor and control our messaging.  Hang the Constitution.

The hearing was called to focus on the government’s role in social media censorship, specifically concerning the response to the January 6 riot and the subsequent banning of President Trump, and to examine “recent attacks on independent journalism and free expression,” according to the Judiciary Committee press release.

https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4

FOX NEWS’ Kevin Corke had a wrap-up on the hearing late Thursday night, including a clip from Shellenberger offering an ominous warning: “The scope, power and law-breaking of the ‘censorship industrial complex’ are even worse than we had realized back in March.”

And to those who would call conservative folks like us “deep-staters” and “conspiracy theorists” for being alarmed about this, Matt Taibbi (not a conservative) said, “This isn’t crazy conspiracy theory.  We’ve already had four federal judges rule that they believe this activity violates the First Amendment.  This is quite serious…”

These journalists testified to the committee about a group called the “Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which partnered with government agencies (here we go again) such as the FBI to censor American citizens.  Whistleblowers have alleged that members of this group have made up fake personas and even used burner phones as a way to counter certain voices on social media.

Democrats, predictably, slammed this hearing as a political stunt, and that surely will be the talking point on all the copycat media today.

….

But here’s something at least one Democrat, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, is concerned about:  something called the Hemisphere Project, a White House-backed program in partnership with AT&T to collect phone call records of Americans and provide law enforcement access to the databases.  Sen. Wyden calls this “a long-running dragnet surveillance program in which the White House pays AT&T to provide all federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies the ability to request often-warrantless searches of trillions of domestic phone records.”

A letter from the senator to Attorney General Merrick Garland describes how Hemisphere’s funding it set up to skirt the usually-mandatory federal privacy review, which makes findings public.  This system has been metastasizing since its origin in 2013.  THE EPOCH TIMES has details...

https://www.ntd.com/white-house-surveillance-program-collecting-trillions-of-domestic-phone-records

Also, the House Judiciary Committee is accusing the Biden administration of collaborating with social media workers at Google and YouTube (owned by Google) in 2021, specifically to suppress “unapproved” information about COVID and vaccines.

As reported by FOX BUSINESS NEWS, “...documents...reveal a level of correspondence previously unknown to the American public, as President Biden and his aides sought to promote coronavirus vaccinations...”

Sample communication, from April ‘21: “Unfortunately, the role of tech in addressing vaccine hesitancy is about to come under a massive spotlight particularly as the supply of the vaccine is soon to outpace demand.”  Well, we can’t have THAT.

Never mind that so much of the “information” approved by the government (and, thus, by YouTube) was actually MIS-information.  And they suppressed information that turned out to be accurate.  They were not “following ‘the science.’”  They were not allowing Americans to make informed decisions.  Instead, they wanted us to believe that there was research showing the vaccines prevented infection and transmission, which was a lie.  Heck, they apparently wanted us to believe whatever we needed to believe in order to get that “jab.”  And then the next.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/white-house-worked-youtube-censor-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation-house-judiciary-committee

Laura Ingraham featured excellent must-see coverage of the government’s assault on the First Amendment on her Thursday INGRAHAM ANGLE.  Watch in fascination as Democrat Rep. Dan Goldman shows (again) how stupid he is, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz suggests that Taibbi would be fine with live-streaming rape and murder online.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6342124610112