Dear Readership,
As we head into the new year, I wanted to take a second to thank every one of you for your support. Many of you have emailed me with comments, feedback, or words of encouragement. You have no idea how much that has meant to me.
For those inclined to make a New Year’s resolution – I wish you success in whatever you choose. For those who aren’t – it may behoove you to quickly make one up and keep it in your back pocket for that moment someone inevitably asks. You know they will. Best to not be caught flat-footed. And you can only use that “I’m not eating sweets” answer so many years in a row.
A couple years back, I was sitting in an airport terminal waiting to board a flight. There was a middle-aged couple sitting directly across from me. She was chomping on a piece of gum a mile a minute and her eyes were wandering every which way. He had his head in a crossword and a good chunk of his shirt was untucked, exposing the Fruit of the Loom logo. Out of the blue she asked him what his New Year’s resolution was going to be. Within a millisecond— I kid you not—he replied, matter-of-factly, “not being a dick.” His eyes never left the crossword.
She took a second to process his answer, then proceeded to furl her lips up toward her nose and nod approvingly.
Those were the only words they exchanged for the some forty minutes they sat at the gate.
I’m pretty sure I let out a humored exhale when I overheard this. But when I replayed the exchange in the confused state of half-consciousness that the plane had lulled me into as it reached cruise altitude, I remember thinking to myself, “you know – that’s actually not such a bad answer.”
I have a lot in store for this newsletter in 2023—ideas abound!—and I plan on really kicking it into high gear at the turn of the year. I’ll tighten up the “what to expect” blurb, refine the newsletter’s mission statement, and share some more about me, my journey, and why I decided to start this publication (dun dun dunnn).
You may have noticed that for the past few weeks I’ve opted to publish standalone pieces instead of the “This Week, Today” product line. I may revive it in due time, perhaps with some tweaks, bandwidth permitting. But for now, I think my time and energy is best spent writing focused pieces.
I’m currently working one on Japan’s decision to nearly double its defense spending, a change that would make the heretofore pacifist country the world’s third largest defense spender behind the U.S. and China. This is a big deal. Especially when it dawns on you that Japan will soon spend more on its military than Russia, caretaker of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and India, a country with a population of 1.4 billion people and a standing army that is proportionally massive.
Finally, I wanted to use some of the real estate below to comment on a couple of stories I haven’t yet had time to. These have been in my queue for some time and in the spirit of starting anew with the changing calendar, I figured it would be nice to X them of the list. New year, new queue.
Thanks again for your support.
Cheers,
JH
Biden’s 2024 Ambition.
Joe Biden has publicly stated that while it’s his “intent” to run for reelection in 2024, he has not yet made a firm decision to do so. Nor has he filed the paperwork required before publicly announcing the start of a campaign. The official White House line is that he planned to talk it over with his family over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, then announce his decision one way or the other in early 2023. It’s widely known that the only advisor whose opinion on a 2024 run really matters is that of the First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden. “Happy wife, happy life,” so the adage goes.
Two events, though, that occurred on December 2nd provide us with the clearest indication yet that Biden has in fact decided to run for reelection in 2024. That day, he reportedly called up Democratic National Committee (DNC) big wigs and had it known that it was his preference that South Carolina replace Iowa as the first-in-nation race for the 2024 Democratic primary. Iowa has held that treasured status since 1972, so this was kindaaaa a big deal.
You’ll recall that Biden’s bid to secure the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential election was saved by Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a Dem power broker who basically rules the party’s constituency in that state (which is made up predominantly of black voters). South Carolina was 4th up in the primary race and the last early-voting state before Super Tuesday, the day most states hold their own primaries. Biden had lost the first 3 races – Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. If he didn’t win South Carolina, the chances of him winning the nomination were basically nil. Luckily for him, he managed to secure Clyburn’s endorsement just 3 days before the race, then won the state by a landslide, before cleaning up pretty well days later on Super Tuesday. Clyburn and his South Carolinian constituency saved Biden’s candidacy in exchange for assurances that he’d choose a black vice president and nominate a black judge to the Supreme Court, if elected (he’s since answered the mail on both counts).
By requesting Iowa get booted and replaced with South Carolina, Biden is telling would-be challengers within the party: “no funny business; I’m the leader of this party, best not cross me in 2024.”
A DNC panel endorsed Biden’s recommendation a day later. The broader party apparatus will put it to a vote in early 2023. The change will likely be adopted.
The other event occurred in the evening of December 2nd, hours after Biden’s calls to DNC leadership. This one is less ambiguous as to where Biden stands. Per reporting by The New York Times, Jill Biden, while at the State Dinner for the visiting President of France, Emmanuel Macron, let it slip that exercise is essential to her wellbeing – especially on the campaign trail.
Probed further on this by a curious Macron, who asked whether she was ready for another campaign, Jill reportedly replied, emphatically, “Absolutely!” Macron then raised a glass and toasted to Biden’s 2024 campaign. The president reportedly didn’t object to the notion that he had already decided to run, and raised a glass too.
So it seems we may get that Biden-Trump rematch, after all.
Though it’s far from certain. Age is an issue – not just for Biden; Trump would be just months shy of the same age Biden was when he entered office in 2020. Even if he announces his candidacy, Biden could still pull the plug before 2024. His son Hunter is about to get dragged through the coals by a Republican-held House of Representatives. The ordeal could convince the family it’s time to quit politics. Trump, meanwhile, has been kneecapping himself as of late. It’s really starting to look like his 2024 campaign is more about insulating himself from ongoing Justice Department investigations than Making America Great Again-Again.
So, in sum, while the 2024 race has begun to take shape, nothing’s set in stone.
What the Hell is Going on at Twitter? A lot.
Elon Musk’s nearly 3-month reign over Twitter has been chaotic. He’s led the company like a schizophrenic. He fired thousands of employees in a span of one day, then asked hundreds of them to come back days later. He greenlighted a new subscription-based revenue stream for the platform, then axed the feature, then reinstated it once again.
He heralds himself as a “Free Speech Absolutist” and claims Twitter ought to serve as the modern-day town square where issues can be debated and ideas can flow freely without reprimand. Yet he up and suspended a handful of journalists who were critical of him on shaky pretenses.
When this led other journalists to begin their retreat from Twitter, he banned them from tweeting out links to their accounts on other social media platforms. Hours later, he reversed this decision.
Amid the hysteria over this antic, he put his continued helmsmanship of the company to a Twitter poll. 57.5% of respondents voted to give him the boot.
His response to the results is telling. “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he tweeted.
It’s a bit of a Freudian slip if you ask me. He’s the fool who overpaid by 20 billion dollars for an app that hasn’t booked an annual profit since 2019. He resents this lapse in judgement. And he resents how his ownership of Twitter has tanked the stock of his real baby, Tesla.
Elon’s antics have cast a shadow over the so-called “Twitter Files,” an initiative that is fundamental to the U.S. debate on censorship and the relationship between Big Government and Big Tech, but which has received scant attention by the mainstream press.
Elon gave independent-minded journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, and some of their associates access to a drove of internal Twitter documents, screenshots, emails, and chat logs circa 2020-2022, when the company was under previous management. Between the poisonous presidential election and the COVID pandemic, this was a time period of incredible strife in America.
Twitter exacerbated tensions during this time by making highly controversial “content moderation” decisions. It prohibited users from posting links to the Hunter Biden laptop story published by the New York Post—American’s oldest newspaper—just days before the 2020 election (mainstream media outlets have since confirmed the veracity of laptop). It booted Donald Trump from Twitter, while allowing dictators around the world to platform. It censored tweets that ran afoul of CDC and FDA talking points on COVID-19. For instance, users who claimed that the COVID vaccine didn’t prevent transmission received a “misinformation” banner on their tweets for a period of time (that is until U.S. officials came clean and acknowledged what was obvious to everyone else).
By sharing the behind-the-scenes record into how these and other moderation decisions were made, Elon hoped to restore trust in Twitter and corral disaffected users back to the platform who’d perceived the company had become an agent of the Left. As he told Weiss, “We have a goal here, which is to clear the decks of any prior wrongdoing and move forward with a clean slate.”
Elon’s only condition was that the journalists document their findings in Tweet threads.
It’s safe to say this format, as well as the unorganized trickle of revelations (you never know when they’re going to release another 80-tweet thread), has dulled the impact of the findings. But make no mistake, there have been some bombshells.
Taibbi’s reporting has revealed that Twitter’s moderation team had a much deeper relationship with the FBI (and, by extension, the broader U.S. Intelligence Community) than was previously known. He found, for example, that Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s content moderation team, had exchanged over 150 emails with FBI contacts between 2020 to 2022. Much of their correspondence concerned users on the platform whom the FBI deemed questionable. The FBI would “pre-flag” users whom they suspected were peddling election misinformation to Yoel and others. Yoel and team would look into the accounts to determine if the accounts had violated Twitter’s Terms of Service, then report back on whether or not action was warranted. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi claimed.
Shellenberger’s reporting demonstrates that this relationship in part “primed” the moderation team to censor the Hunter Biden story, only for the employees to reverse the decision when they realized the move lacked a firm policy basis (and, well, the story turned out to be accurate).
Weiss’ reporting revealed how Twitter’s rag tag team of content moderators, in part fueled by their own political biases, rejiggered Twitter policies to justify kicking Trump off the platform. But they didn’t apply these same standards to other world leaders like the Ayatollah of Iran or the Prime Minister of Ethiopia who had tweeted even more egregious things (i.e., tweets that had clearly incited violence). Her reporting also confirmed that the company had secretly suppressed the visibility of certain Twitter accounts deemed undesirable – a practice known as “shadow banning.” She dug up evidence that seemed to prove that Twitter had applied this practice unevenly by disproportionally suppressing accounts of conservative-leaning voices.
Fang’s reporting revealed that while Twitter made a concerted effort to take down accounts ginned up by foreign countries’ intelligence services for the purposes of amplifying government propaganda, the company allowed U.S. Government-linked accounts that were doing the same thing to remain on the platform. Fang documents one instance where Twitter actually acceded to requests from an employee of U.S. Central Command (the DOD component in charge of U.S. military operations in the Middle East) to amplify a list of Arab-language accounts the Pentagon used to advance U.S. narratives regarding Yemen, Iran, and Syria.
David Zweig, subcontracted out by Bari Weiss, reported the ways in which the U.S. government, during both the Trump and Biden Administrations, had pressured Twitter to “elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic.” Twitter often complied with their requests – a move which, in effect, limited the range of acceptable discourse on COVID to that which you’d find on CDC factsheets.
Those are only some of the highlights. And these journalists are still chipping away at the enormous data set Elon plopped into their laps, meaning we can expect more fidelity on these and other yet-to-be discovered subplots.
For some, the revelations so far show a Twitter that was staffed by fallible employees who did their best under enormous pressure in an age of rampant misinformation and a global pandemic where social media companies had to take rash moves to save lives. Any extant government pressure placed on Twitter was, in their eyes, just that – pressure. Twitter was not legally required to act on requests by government employees to censor certain users or topics. Nor did they have to participate in those various meetings the FBI had requested. They did so voluntarily, so there’s been no breach of the first amendment right to free speech. And they’re a private company, so it’s not a crime that they harbored a distinct liberal bias.
For others, the revelations prove that Twitter was staffed by liberal hacks who consistently contradicted their own Terms of Service (or amended them on the fly) to censor conservative voices, positions, or opinions that challenged Left orthodoxy. The U.S. government exploited their predilection toward censoring speech to advance its national security interests and to silence voices or ideas that contradicted ***mostly*** Biden Administration policies. Even if indirect, the pressure government employees exerted on Twitter was so strong that a case could be made that they’d infringed on the first amendment right to free speech. Twitter was effectively an arm of the government, so they contend.
I don’t think either of these explanations capture what the “Twitter Files” have thus far proven. My sense is that there’s a lot more nuance to the story than has yet to be teased out. So, to be completely honest, I’m still working out where I stand with all of this (stay tuned).
That said, I do think this initiative is incredibly important to the public debate.
Legacy media institutions could help bring this debate to the mainstream by weighing in on the revelations and contributing to the reporting. But they’re not touching anything that has Elon’s scent on it.
I wonder if that would be different had Elon acted a little more corporate. It didn’t have to be this way.