The FBI, Facebook, and Frank Church

I am not hostile to Facebook like many of my friends on the right. I see Google and Twitter as seriously threatening toward conservatives and have deep reservations about Apple employees in the Apple News division. Many of those employees come from left-leaning news institutions, and in my own house, I have seen a recurring pattern of Apple News’ notifications pushing left-leaning stories. But Apple, at least, takes my privacy very seriously.

Twitter is a menace to conservatives, and while I use the platform almost as a necessary component of my work, I would love to see the company crash, burn, and its employees ruined. I have nothing but contempt for the company and how its employees have used Twitter’s trending topics to mobilize leftwing mobs, etc.

Google’s own employees openly say that they can shape the Google algorithm to make search results inclusive. Let in enough people across the intersectional spectrum, and the search results themselves can diversify. The very same employees who say that are openly contemptuous of conservatives, and if they can diversify the search results, they can and probably do also use that against conservatives. Google’s senior leadership is of the left. YouTube is hostile to the right and believes it has some responsibility to censor things its progressive leaders consider harmful. Often those things align with the social causes of the left.

TikTok is a Chinese intelligence operation wherein the Chinese harness woke Americans to induce our children into transgender surgeries, all while compiling a facial recognition database. It is the most dangerous social media site on the planet. Americans have allowed their children to be willing users of a Chinese surveillance system.

Then there’s Facebook. Facebook has allowed conservative sites like the Daily Wire to thrive. It has sponsored my conference in the past. When other sites were banning the guy who put up that video of Nancy Pelosi’s speech slowed down to make it look like she had serious issues beyond the ones she actually has, Facebook left the guy alone.

Twitter has banned the Babylon Bee. Facebook has not. Twitter has banned those who point out Ellen Page, not Elliot Page, is the actress in the movie Juno. Facebook has not. Twitter has an official policy of banning those who “dead name” people, and Facebook does not. Twitter is captured by the left. Facebook just has a lot of progressives who work there.

Progressives adored Facebook when Obama was President. Mark Zuckerberg could do no wrong. But in 2016, Trump mastered Facebook and Clinton blew them off. Trump won, and the left needed a bad guy. Once it turned out the Russians had spent about $20,000 on Facebook, Zuckerberg became enemy number one. Unlike Twitter, progressives think Facebook should be captured by them and resent that it is not.

Facebook is not a perfect platform. As part of its penance to the left and media over “misinformation,” Facebook allowed in fact-checkers. Notably, mostly progressive fact-checking organizations volunteered. As a result, conservative news items and Babylon Bee parodies routinely got flagged. By outsourcing its systems to independent fact-checkers, Facebook created a system where people on the right could see biases in the system. Progressives took advantage of the system.

The company also banned President Trump permanently and others but commendably has been far more resistant to banning people on the right than other platforms. Facebook, as well, has refused to do business in China. Facebook sees itself as an American company, while companies like Twitter and Google view themselves as transcendently progressive.

This brings me to the FBI.

Late last week, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in an interview that the company suppressed information on Hunter Biden at the end of the 2020 presidential campaign. The company did so after being approached by FBI agents about disinformation circulating designed to impact the presidential campaign.

We know as many conservatives did then, that the Hunter Biden laptop information is real and serious. But we continue to see more and more how the FBI, at a senior level, has entrenched political biases for and sympathies for the left.

Peter Strozk, Andrew McCabe, etc., all have revealed themselves on CNN as willful partisans of the left with a left-leaning worldview. We’ve seen so many in our intelligence community who signed the letter claiming the Hunter Biden story was Russian disinformation later go on television as rote, unthinking progressive partisans.

Facebook responded to the FBI request as any American business might. They believed the FBI to be a credible agency with American interests at stake. They did not say anything publicly because why would any American or American business want to be on the bad side of the FBI?

As a result, FBI agents used Facebook to suppress a legitimate story. (Editor’s Addendum: to provide a bit more clarity, unlike Twitter, Facebook did not block the circulation of the story, but for seven days “demoted” the story so that people could share it, but the story would not prominently be displayed in the Facebook news feed.)

FBI agents have made some serious screw-ups in the past decade, from their mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation to their mishandling of the Larry Nasser investigation. Forget the hot-button political topics — just the basics; the FBI has had some major screw-ups. To their credit, they’ve generally been good at disrupting Islamic terror cells in the nation, but domestically, their record is decidedly mixed. And now this.

On Facebook, I think the company could stand to stop trying to deal with misinformation and disinformation. Instead, I think the company should aggressively push back against the press that Facebook is not the content creator and the press’s own track record of misinformation and disinformation gives it no room to lecture Facebook. Get rid of the progressive hall monitors fact-checking conservatives.

Regarding the FBI, my friend Russ Vought heads the Center for Renewing America.

Russ has been calling for a Church Committee. In 1975, Democrat Senator Frank Church chaired the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, more commonly called the Church Committee. It sought to investigate and reform the intelligence operations of the United States.

The committee unearthed a series of disturbing allegations about the CIA, though some were overblown and overplayed by the left. Still, the committee showed that at the highest levels, the CIA wasn’t really just focused on intelligence gathering but was also occasionally operating against the interests of American citizens.

It is clear now the FBI needs some reforms. Again, remove the issue of Trump, Russia, and Hunter Biden for just a minute. We’ve had the Jeffrey Epstein case and the Larry Nasser case, among others. Add in those others, and the FBI, at the senior level, clearly seems to have biases against many Americans on the right and actively worked to suppress a legitimate news story.

I don’t fault Facebook for complying with a request from the FBI. God help them if the company, already drawing Washington’s ire, got on the wrong side of the FBI, particularly knowing what we know about its senior leadership’s biases.

That the FBI went there, however, is another example of the FBI stepping into partisan politics. And now, on a daily basis, we read its leaks to the New York Times about Trump. We see Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe as partisan progressives on television. We know the fictions conjured by FBI agents to get warrants on people like Carter Page.

It is time to investigate the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ensure we have a competent FBI that the American people can trust.