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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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List of alleged ex-FBI people working for Twitter.

Quite a lot of names. 16 directors or managers. All hired since the '16 debacle.

Reminds one of the Chinese demand for CPC members being in company management.

Is it random ? Or does this support the claim Twitter is uniquely important in the information landscape as a place where journalists get their stories and hang out.

Volunteer reddit moderators purged trump supporters from their subreddits with no institutional backing whatsoever! You'd expect - and did see - the same from progressive twitter moderators without FBI intervention. Most being hired after '16 is explained by most twitter hires as a whole being recently - if a company's exponentially growing employee count (including if it overhires), most employees are recent. Thinking the FBI is somehow a specific central organ that's dictatorially intervening isn't right - are there even any specific pieces of evidence for that - distributed consensus and pressure from all parts of civil society, including your leadership and employees is much more accurate. And 'pressure from leadership and employees' is just being part of it and agreeing!

Also, most of those employees are in 'security', as opposed to 'trust and safety' or similar, and ex-FBI hires make sense for that.

Of course it makes sense you put them in 'security'. They're ex-FBI, duh.

But are they doing actual security, or are they there to ensure compliance ?

The political editor over at Newsweek who got the half-Arab/half-Russian reporter fired was officially doing something related to sports.

His slack activity showed something else.

Because twitter is where marching orders for all the second-hand ideas dealers are handed out.

It's where likes and retweets can be used to reward worthy causes and sink unworthy causes.

Thinking the FBI is somehow a specific central organ that's dictatorially intervening isn't right

The entire plot against Trump was very heavy on FBI people.

FBI apparently orchestrated the J6 farce.

You know, when it comes to you, I can't decide whether you're a reflexive contrarian or something else entirely.

FBI apparently orchestrated the J6 farce.

What's the evidence for this?

What's the evidence for this?

Evidence in addition of proven FBI SOP of infiltrating, manipulating and inciting all kinds of "right wing" "racist" "extremist" groups?

What standard of evidence? You are not going to see evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" until documents are declassified (wait few decades) or fall of the regime and opening of archives (good luck waiting for this).

But, for starter, see this twitter thread listing interesting events around this event (sourced from impeccable mainstream sources).

https://twitter.com/BoltzmannBooty/status/1422298278188748802

You got me wrong. That was not an adversarial comment. I actually know next to nothing about this whole thing.

From a (very cursory) reading of that twitter thread (God I hate twitter, I hope Elon sinks it soon), it seems as if there were a handful of FBI undercover agents among the Proud Boys, one of the many groups involved in Jan 6. Then there is some far-fetched speculation that they may or may not have been among those people giving orders? Unless I am missing quite a lot, that's fishy, but a far cry from "the FBI orchestrated J6".

Not only FBI, Secret Service and DHS were also informed in advance that Trumpers will spontaneously decide to desecrate the temple of freedom and democracy.

Some non-Twitter links from non-respectable sources digging deep into this rabbit hole.

Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol

Meet Ray Epps, Part 2

This means Epps came to the Trump speech early in the morning with the sole intention of recruiting a mob to follow on the heels of the Capitol breach team he would personally oversee while Trump was speaking—the very breach team we have covered in this report whose operators would remove the fencing, signage and barricades before the masses would arrive at the Capitol.

Let’s put this all in context:

Ray Epps flew 2,300 miles from Phoenix, Arizona to Washington, DC for a Trump rally, supposedly as a Trump supporter.

Epps arrived at the rally entrance more than two hours early, camped out to constantly shout recruiting instructions about coming to the Capitol after the speech, but then skipped out on the speech itself, because he was too busy personally orchestrating the Big Bang Breach Team that kicked off the riot and tore down the fencing, barricades and signage, which made rallygoers totally unaware of the legal booby trap they had walked into.

Article is one year old, what happened to Ray Epps since then? Arrested and tortured like the rank and file rioters?

Nothing. NYT debunked all crazy conspiracy theories, there is no need to do anything.

During the interview, committee officials said, Mr. Epps said that he was not an F.B.I. informant and denied reports that he had urged protesters to go into the Capitol at the behest of federal law enforcement agencies.