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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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This is a relatively small thought. But watching more mainstream news being home for Christmas I see the supposedly moderate channels like NBC/ABC constantly running Santos lying about his resume and absolutely zero coverage of alphabet agency interference with twitters moderation. No mention that the fbi was paying twitter 3.5 million and suggesting who to censor.

The former I do think is bad that he lied. The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination. What is it WaPo declares that Democracy dies in Darkness? And there is nothing in the mainstream media about the scandal.

The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination.

I cannot tell if this is intended to be hyperbole. I feel like I could name a dozen government scandals worse than anything the US government could possibly have been doing with Twitter. Iran-Contra? NSA spying? Watergate? Pentagon papers? The government pressuring a social media company to suppress speech it doesn't like and promote its own agenda is bad, to be sure, but I am not sure it is "sell weapons to Iran and send the profits to South American rebels in direct violation of an act of Congress" bad.

Watergate was a partisan hitjob on Nixon, who did nothing wrong.

Iran-Contra is definitely a bigger scandal in my mind, as are the Snowden revelations. But this seems like a direct extension of Snowden's leaks, showing how the federal government suppresses, surveils, and manipulates speech to maintain control.

But I would say complete warrantless (or rubber stamp secret courts, which is actually worse) surveillance of every single person across every single server that sends data through America is still the biggest scandal in my lifetime, and until someone takes up the mantle of JFK and tries to break the NSA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, our reaction will continue to be feckless.

until someone takes up the mantle of JFK and tries to break the NSA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, our reaction will continue to be feckless

If I am reading this correctly, you think there needs to be a martyr president who catches a bullet from the feds to galvanize the people? Because frankly I don't think even that would result in much. Best case scenario is it riles up a group of people, but the whole thing gets spun into a culture war issue. But to begin with I seriously doubt anyone who would earnestly attempt to defang/disband the NSA would ever make it to being president. Bernie is probably the closest.