Michael Shellenberger, one of three independent journalists tasked by Twitter CEO Elon Musk to investigate and expose the contents of the “Twitter Files,” joined Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan last week to discuss what the trio has discovered about the infiltration of social media platforms by U.S. intelligence agencies.
One of Shellenberger’s most illuminating revelations involved a June 2020 “tabletop exercise” conducted by the Aspen Institute, a progressive nonprofit whose stated mission is the realization of “a free, just, and equitable society.” This organization is funded by donors such as the Carnegie Corporation, the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and yes, your tax dollars.
According to Shellenberger, the exercise involved role-playing on how to respond to a Russian “hack and leak” operation regarding Hunter Biden. The timing is especially interesting considering the FBI had taken possession of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop six months prior.
Jean Paul Mac Isaac, the proprietor of the Wilmington, Delaware, computer repair shop where Biden dropped off his laptop in April 2019, turned it over to the FBI after repeated attempts to reach Hunter Biden failed. He also provided a copy of the hard drive to then-President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Noting that the Aspen Institute is “funded by the U.S. government,” Shellenberger told Rogan, “[T]he thing that really freaks me out was this thing that the Aspen Institute had. They called it a ‘tabletop exercise’ but it was actually a Zoom call, to role-play how to deal with a Russian hack and leak around Hunter Biden, in like June 2020, months before Rudy Giuliani gives the laptop to the New York Post.
“Why in the hell is the Aspen Institute holding a tabletop exercise to pre-bunk? Basically, they are training, or brainwashing, all these journalists,” he continued. “You’ve got CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wikimedia Foundation, the networks, all of the social media companies, coming together to say if something is leaked, we should not cover it in the way that journalists have traditionally covered it.”
This collusion between Big Tech and the federal government has already been well-established. We learned last August that the FBI had cautioned Facebook executives about the potential for a Russian “hack and dump” campaign ahead of the 2020 election. During a lengthy and revealing interview with Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook had received a warning from the FBI about potential Russian misinformation.
Zuckerberg told Rogan, “The FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and said, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on a notice; basically, there’s about to be some kind of a dump that is similar to that, so just be vigilant.’”
This warning came shortly before the New York Post broke its bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020.
But news that the Aspen Institute had deliberately convened a group of media influencers to set the framework for a disinformation campaign of their own — one designed to alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election — takes the FBI’s complicity to an entirely new level.
Shellenberger shared a second startling finding, this one involving a 2020 report from Stanford University that said, “Reporters should no longer follow the ‘Pentagon Papers’ principle.”
The Pentagon Papers, a government-commissioned study of the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War, were famously leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1971 by Daniel Ellsberg, one of the authors. A legal battle between the Nixon administration and the Times ensued and went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, the Times prevailed and the papers were published. The decision was hailed as a great victory for free speech.
“It’s this kind of incredible moment in American journalism where the First Amendment gives these newspapers the right to publish hacked or leaked information,” Shellenberger told Rogan. “And here you have Stanford University and the Aspen Institute saying we should stop doing that. Journalists should no longer write about leaked information in that way — instead we should focus on the person that leaked it.”
“It really sent chills up my spine,” he said. “It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. And Aspen is funded by the U.S. government; Stanford is funded by the U.S. government. One of the responses we’ve gotten is, ‘You’re just talking about content moderation by private companies.’ No, we’re talking about U.S. government-funded organizations.”
Shellenberger’s findings, and the release of the “Twitter Files,” have confirmed that, every step of the way, the Biden campaign was aided and abetted by the FBI, Big Tech executives, and the national press, who all shared a common goal: to ensure a Biden victory in 2020.
Who’s to say 2024 will be any different?
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