Likely A Worthwhile Endeavor – Matt Taibbi Looking for Research Help


Posted originally on the CTH on February 12, 2023 | Sundance 

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi is looking for some additional research assistance [SEE HERE]. Specifically, after going a little deeper on the Twitter Files, Taibbi appears to be recognizing the visibility of the Fourth Branch of Government.  He now needs to package the truth of it, in a way his former tribe will accept.

As a consequence, Taibbi is looking for (1) a reporter or academic with experience researching government contracts, and/or the funding of NGOs or academic research institutions; and (2) an infographics designer, preferably with experience in areas like ecosystem mapping.

Taibbi is a solid and inquisitive research journalist. However, he is still averse to recognizing Chicago Jesus as the originator of the modern issues he is outlining.

The issue of not accepting the Obama network as the structure that underpins the modern political surveillance state is common, even amid the tribe of walkaways from the progressive system.

Give him time, he’ll find see it.

From his current mission as expressed: […] “For decades, our government at least loosely complied with legislation like the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits aiming at the domestic population any official propaganda “intended for foreign audiences.” However, gloves came off in recent years.

In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.

The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda. Some of this messaging devolves into outright smear campaigns, with efforts to denounce the organic #WalkAway hashtag as a Russian “psychological operation” serving as a particularly lurid example. The Hamilton 68 story (about which more is coming) hints at this dynamic.

The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.

Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about “threats to democracy.” I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time. The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed. This project is about both of those things, too.

Foreign state media is labeled on platforms like Twitter.

I want to put labels on our own propaganda, and need your help to do it.” 

Matt Taibbi

If he keeps going…. he will see it.

[Understand Modern Fourth Branch of Govt Here]

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; that system was created by President George W Bush and VP Dick Cheney.  Instead, what they did was take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons only targeted one side of the political continuum.

The intelligence apparatus does not want their public-private partnership, between government and big tech social media, interfered with.  President Obama steps forth in April 2022 to put an exclamation point in place, saying the public-private partnership he created must control the information.  WATCH:

I cannot emphasize strongly enough; how close this collective demand is to a similar construct in Orwell’s 1984 prediction of “The Ministry of Truth.”  Indeed, if you follow the need for government control of information its logical conclusion, these demands by the U.S. deep state architects are identical.

I also hope readers can see this speech for what it is.  THIS is exactly what we were warning about when the shadows were moving feverously in the past several weeks {GO DEEP}.   The catchphrases “disinformation”, “misinformation” and “malinformation” are being cited by President Obama in that speech.   Where did that lingo come from?  THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY {SEE HERE}

At the top of all critical issues we must understand, share and keep focus on, the issue surrounding the free flow of information is the most critical.

Free speech, social media platforming, user bans, censorship, demonetization, financial targeting of Canadian truckers, Elon Musk purchasing Twitter then reveals the Twitter files, our ability to communicate, the culture war, the digital identity issue, heck, even your ability to read this, all of it, surrounds the central component of information.

This is the big war.  Controlling, labeling, emphasizing, downplaying, removing, information; everything else is downstream from this fight.

While President Obama talked about the dangers of misinformation and disinformation, it was only a week prior when the White House officially admitted to creating misinformation, disinformation and malinformation as part of their strategic campaign against Russia in Ukraine.  NBC news gleefully embraced the strategy {SEE HERE}.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has an official agency mission {SEE HERE} to “help the American people understand the scope and scale of Mal, Dis, and Misinformation activities,” and Google/DuckDuckGo/Big Tech have officially aligned with both U.S. government interests promising to target, remove and penalize any entity engaged in Mal, Dis and Misinformation activities.

Putting aside the creation of lies to advance a strategic geopolitical objective, the bigger admission in the U.S. government is that much of the information coming to the American public – from them – is manufactured, false, fabricated and wrong.

Simultaneous to this admission of manufactured lies, the platforms of Big Tech and social media are saying they will target, remove and block any content that contradicts the official government position.  The govt boldly admits they lie, and social media states they will block anyone who refutes those lies.

In the case of Google, the dominating search engine for information over the internet, they state it is an infraction against their policy to espouse a claim “that contradicts official government records.”  Yet, the U.S. government is officially admitting the information they are creating for the government records, is self-admittedly false….. and now in comes DuckDuckGo with the assist.

Not wanting to overinflate the CTH position, but this admitted reality is exactly why we have taken the following position.

…”There is no such thing as “disinformation” or “misinformation”.  There is only information you accept and information you do not accept.  You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.”… 

There are only two elements within the public discussion of information, truth and not truth.

In an era filled with “fact-checkers” and institutional guardians at the gates of Big Tech, let me explain exactly why it is important not to accept the speech rules of the guards.

When you accept the terms “disinformation”, “misinformation” or the newest lingo, “malinformation,” you are beginning to categorize truth and lies in various shades.  You are merging black and white, right and wrong, into various shades of grey.

When your mind works in the grey zone, you are, by direct and factual consequence, saying there is a problem.  You are correct; however, this is where people may make a mistake. That problem is supposed to be there.

It is not a solution to the problem to try and remove the grey simply because it takes too much work to separate the white pixels from the black ones.

You were born with a gift, the greatest gift a loving God could provide.  You were born with a brain and set of natural instincts that are tools to do this pixel separation, use them.

If you define the grey work as a problem you cannot solve on your own, you open the door for others to solve that problem for you.  You begin to abdicate the work, and that’s when trouble can enter.  The sliding scale of Pinocchios is one of the most familiar yet goofy outcomes.

Put more clearly, when you accept the terminology “disinformation”, you accept a problem.  The problem is then the tool by which authorities will step in to make judgements.  Speech, in its most consequential form, is then qualified by others to whom you have sub-contracted your thinking.

When you willingly sub-contract information filters to others, you have lost connection with the raw information.   CTH was founded upon the belief that truth has no agenda, nor does it care about you, your feelings, or your opinion of it.  It just sits there, empirically existing as evidence of information in its most pure form.

The search for truth, in all things, is the mission objective of this assembly.  Often, we don’t like the truth; often, the truth is bitter, cold, challenging and even painful to accept.  However, the truth doesn’t care.  Information in its most raw form is ambivalent to your opinion.  If you struggle to accept these things, that’s when you need grey.  The New York Times is not called the “grey lady” accidentally.

Personally, I am an absorber of information – perhaps on a scale that is unusual.  But I do not discount information from any form until I can put context to it and see if the information makes sense given all the variables present.  When something doesn’t feel right, it’s almost always because it isn’t right.

Often, I find myself struggling in the grey and complex.  It is not unusual to spend days researching, digging, clarifying a situation, only to discover the path to finding the truth is in another direction entirely.   Erasing everything and starting over is frustrating, but it is genuinely the only approach that works; and often finding truth is supposed to be difficult, that’s why it is rewarding.

In the digital information age, we are bombarded with information.  It is easy to be overwhelmed and need to find something or someone who has better skills at separating the black grains from the white ones.  All opinions in this quest should be considered; thus, it is important to allow the free flow of information.

I am not necessarily a speech absolutist.  There is some language that needs to be constrained if we are to participate in a respectful society, with grandma’s rules and knowing the audience.  The CTH has guidelines for comments for this exact reason.  However, those constraints need to be based on a set of inherent values.   When it comes to information it is important to draw a distinction from speech.

There needs to be an open venue for all information. Unfortunately, when we begin to apply labels or categorization to information, there’s an opportunity for information to be manipulated – even weaponized.  Saul Alinsky spent decades pondering the best techniques to weaponize information and speech.  Alinsky’s intentions, in the endeavor to change society by changing how language and information was used, were not good. He devoted his completed rulebook book to Lucifer.

Be careful about anyone saying we need to label or categorize information in order to control or remove speech from the discussion.

You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a God-given brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.

Unfortunately, the collectively aligned group of U.S. Govt, the Intelligence Community and now Big Tech, are saying they will put every roadblock they can muster in your way as you attempt to navigate through the misinformation they control.

Team Obama built the system, and now Team Obama are defending the system.

This also happened in April, 2022, the day before Obama’s speech….

….These are NOT coincidences.

Neil Oliver Outlines the Weaponry of Words, as Used to Shut Down Truth and Hide Perversion and Corruption


Posted originally on the CTH on February 11, 2023 | Sundance

Given the recent events at GBNews, I was very interested to see and hear the Neil Oliver monologue this week, to see if the issues of censorship, control and weaponized cultural Marxism would be part of his focus.

In his unique way, Oliver does approach the subject, by targeting the larger social Marxist effort to control speech and language.  Oliver talks about how accurate words are diminished by those who overplay them in order to achieve political gains.  Additionally, how the politically correct (culturally Marxist) intents of the progressive movement, intentionally downplay very real and dangerous outcomes by ignoring events that should be described by the words they overuse.

Oliver also applies the process to the attacks against his own speech.  As Oliver notes, he is now labeled as a “far right-wing racist and antisemite”.  Stay with this and you can see how the overarching dynamic of the past several weeks in U.K. politics is being deconstructed by Oliver’s application of common sense. WATCH:

[Transcript] – The slow creep of ugliness into the language of public debate is impossible to ignore. It is a truly sad state of affairs, a degradation of the quality of discourse, that should finally give us pause, make us stop and take a long hard look at the reality presently being forced upon us.

But the fact is we have grown accustomed to the knee-jerk application of lazy slurs and the smearing of reputations, to the casual abuse of those around us with some of the vilest accusations imaginable.

Racist, sexist, misogynist, transphobe, anti-Semite – the list of tags is long. But just as the ceaseless printing of money has utterly devalued our currencies, so the machine-gun spraying of labels, powerful labels once reserved for specific behaviours, deliberate crimes with malice aforethought, has rendered once lethally effective words all but meaningless.

Even more worrying, the overuse and misuse of words distracts from real crime, real abuse, and real discrimination. Real crimes of racism, committed against people black, white and brown, for racism, neither knows nor respects any colour bar are lost in the haze whipped up by the ceaseless misuse of “racist” in relation to anything and everything.

‘Sexist’ and ‘misogynist’ are likewise bandied about with wild abandon, used almost without exception now for the purposes of silencing unwanted voices, frightening the fainthearted back into their boxes.

Real contempt for the female sex, made manifest, for example, in the coordinated, wholesale rape of underage, white, working-class female children in towns up and down the country abandoned to their fates by authority in its every guise, police, councils, judiciary, government, and entirely overlooked, blind eyes and deaf ears turned. The words that might rightly have been used to describe what was going on were made absent. Instead, all that greeted the news of all that evil and misery was state-sanctioned silence.

Victims of the horror and those who knew about it and sought to raise the alarm and seek justice were shouted down. Those few actually brave enough to point fingers at the guilty were themselves labelled racists. That’s the reality of where we end up when words are overused or misused. Paradoxically, real crime is left to thrive. “Racist” and “misogynist” are words with actual and precise meanings … their use should sound alarm bells to alert us to real horror, real abuse … like that going on for decades in Rotherham, Telford, Oldham and scores of other towns.

That abuse of young girls has not stopped, either and won’t stop while those who could and should be doing something about it find apathy and lack of meaningful concern and action less damaging to their career advancement and political ambition. More and more we live in a society in which keeping the head down or looking the other way feels, to many, like the only option when to speak out, far less to do something, risks being carpet-bombed with the usual verbal abuse.

Real misogyny is at the root too of the blatant and gratuitous misuse of “transphobe” as well. Men speaking up in support of women fighting to preserve the vital sanctity of women-only spaces – toilets and changing rooms, prisons, refuges and the rest – do not receive the full force of the transphobe label.

In another example of misogyny, that insult, along with its even uglier twin TERF is applied most aggressively towards women.

Transphobe – a word properly descriptive of aversion to and hatred of trans people is therefore deliberately misused … and ceaselessly and relentlessly … not to make easier the lives of trans people but to shame, bully and dismiss women voicing concerns that only a handful of years ago would have been regarded as unquestionable common sense.

All of this means real racists and misogynists can go about their brutal business almost unchallenged, while the once powerful and meaningful words, dread words, are pepper sprayed into the faces of anyone and everyone seeking to ask questions of authority, to draw attention to dangerous societal misalignments and to raise the alarm about overreach and mission creep.

Verbal weaponry for use in emergency has been willfully and carelessly repurposed for one thing and one thing only, which is the silencing of debate.

Most important to notice is the certainty that none of this is accidental … nor is it the product of a natural evolution of human behaviour. On the contrary, this choreographed and whipped up name-calling … and let’s face it, name-calling is what it truly is … deploying the oh-so effective tactics of the school playground that none of us apparently outgrow … has been deliberately orchestrated and massively ramped up during these past two or three years of unprecedented change.

It has been done on purpose and the name-calling has been led and driven by government, by nudge units and the rest of the little wizards tasked with the psychological manipulation and perversion of society.

It really got going with “anti-vaxxer”, “covidiot”, “covid-denier” and “granny-killer” that became the round-the-clock stock in trade not just of government ministers but most effectively from the mouths of familiar TV journalists and other media figures.

As with “racist”, “misogynist” and “transphobe” the panoply of pandemic epithets were the childishly effective bludgeon used to try and knock any and all dissent or downright disobedience on the head.

As well as about silencing and controlling, it has been about division. Lockdowns and social distancing kept us physically apart, but even more sinister now is the way we are being set at each other’s throats, fracturing and damaging the very fabric of society.

Again, the ceaseless overuse … of terms like anti-vaxxer … rendered them utterly meaningless. People who had taken the products pushed as vaccines … and been harmed by them and then left in want of recognition, help and compensation … were routinely dismissed as anti-vaxxers, an allegation requiring exquisitely complex mental gymnastics in search of any sense whatsoever.

Anyone questioning the claims as to the safety and effectiveness of those medical products is still automatically defamed as a “covidiot” or a “granny-killer”, or a “covid-denier”.

And yet even though reams of peer-reviewed literature are out there now making plain the reality of harm and risk from taking those products, still the c-words are bandied about.

And again, as with the rest of the name-calling, it’s all about silencing dissenting voices and seizing and maintaining control of narratives.

The ugliness and attempted bullying is everywhere. Perhaps the granddaddy of them all right now – the Swiss Army knife of insults – is right wing. Everyone and everything standing in defiance of the narratives about Covid, the war in Ukraine, the so-called climate crisis, 15-minute cities, is instantly and automatically right wing.

Real old-fashioned right-wingers must be revolving like revolutionaries in their graves at the butchery of a term that was once upon a time actually descriptive of a political position. Fearing the loss of cultural and community cohesion in the face of mass immigration is automatically right-wing, as well as racist, of course. Brexit is right-wing. Love of country is right wing. Gardening is right-wing, and also racist, and so too the English countryside and being good at maths.

After a lifetime of skirting around politics … avoiding the whole sordid business like something left behind on the pavement by a passing canine … I got out of bed one morning a couple of years ago to find I was right-wing too, apparently.

Not just old fashioned, stick in the mud middle of the road right-wing, mind you … but frothing at the mouth, swivel-eyed, ultra-far-right, right-wing.

I achieved this feat by … not moving at all in any direction. I have stayed where I have always been – which is to say in the land of those cynical of politics and politicians of all stripes and therefore politically homeless for a lifetime – while some sort of undetected shifting of the tectonic plates moved the old world out from under my feet and off into the distance never to return.

Articles about me in the newspapers used to describe me as “long-haired” and “Scottish”. Nowadays I’m mostly known to the MSM as right-wing conspiracy theorist Neil Oliver. It’s laughable, but there we are.

I said Right Wing was the granddaddy or at least the catch-all. But of course, that would be to overlook the many megaton explosive power of the a-word … which is ‘antisemite’. Arguably as ubiquitous as racist “antisemite” has an edge of lethal sharpness.

To be labelled antisemitic is to be allegedly guilty of one of the oldest and ugliest sins of all.

Last week a piece in the Guardian raised the spectre of antisemitism, political journalist Peter Walker nudging it as close to me as he dared after I spoke on this channel about the erosion of the thousand-year-old British constitution by one Parliament after another.

It was quite a leap, I can opine that much – but then you’d expect some convoluted reasoning from a Social Justice obsessed newspaper.

It was also imaginative dot-connecting to invite readers to infer anti-semitism in a monologue about the British constitution.

But there you go – it appears antisemitism nowadays, like sexism, misogyny, transphobia and far-right politics, is in the eye of the beholder.

Here’s the thing: as I said at the top … ugliness … unspeakable ugliness … has slithered into our public discourse like sewage from a burst pipe. It has been no accident … rather a deliberate campaign based upon application of the oldest and most childish tactic in the book … that of baseless name-calling … to shore up the defences around official narratives that are collapsing like sandcastles in the face of an incoming tide.

In the process – once important and precisely descriptive words have been utterly compromised until they mean everything and also nothing. After all, if everyone is a right-wing misogynist antisemite, then no one is.

Just as they tried to distract us, from the erosion of our liberties, right under our noses, by fear porn and nudge units … their lockdowns, face masks, forever war and climate crisis … so we are losing sight of real crimes of violence against women, abuse and discrimination on the grounds of race and the persecution of ancient faith and culture.

The truth is that we are over this now. We have had a gut full. We have seen the attempted manipulation, the wordplay and the rest … and we are not fooled for a moment. Words matter at the deepest level of our relationships with one another. Our language is what makes us human and makes possible our society and civilisation. We must reclaim the words like everything else and keep talking sense to one another.

And at the end of the day, if we must be back in the playground again, there’s this: Sticks and stones may break our bones, but names will never hurt us.

[Transcript Link]

NORAD Tracks Another – U.S. Shoots Down Another “Unidentified Object” Over Canadian Yukon Airspace


Posted originally on the CTH on February 11, 2023 | Sundance 

Apparently, there is an influx of “unidentified objects”, somewhat similar to surveillance balloons, coming from the Pacific into U.S. and Canadian airspace.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced earlier today a third “unidentified object” was shot down over Canadian airspace in the Yukon territory.  The third high altitude object was tracked by the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and intercepted by U.S. military F-22 fighters in coordination with the Canadian military.

(CBS News) – An “unidentified object” which “violated “Canadian airspace” was shot down over Canada Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed.   The object was shot down by a U.S. military F-22 over the Yukon, Trudeau said. 

A U.S. official previously confirmed to CBS News Saturday that the object was detected by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and appeared to be a “high-altitude balloon.” 

Trudeau tweeted that “Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled” after he “ordered the take down” of the object by NORAD. 

In a statement to CBS News, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said that the object was detected over Alaska on Friday night, and then monitored by two F-22 fighter jets with the assistance of the Alaska Air National Guard. (read more)

It all seems sketchy….

#TwitterFiles Accountability: Former Twitter Execs Face Congress. Plus, Rogan’s “Anti-Semitism” | SYSTEM UPDATE #37


Glenn Greenwald Posted originally on: Feb 8, 7:00 pm EST

The US Covert Action to Destroy Nord Stream & Russia’s Economy


Armstrong Economics Blog/Russia Re-Posted Feb 9, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

Seymour Hersch won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.  He is one of a dying breed of independent journalists. He has revealed that the United States destroyed Nord Stream Pipeline and this was all part of the Climate Change War where the Neocons are now supporting Nazis to exterminate Russia once and for all while they ask China to please wait quietly in line patiently for their turn to be destroyed. His in-depth article includes:

“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.

Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.”

This is Why I am Against Needless Wars


Armstrong Economics Blog/War Re-Posted Feb 8, 2023 by Martin Armstrong

The human costs that these disgusting politicians lie to our faces, look down upon us as the scum beneath their feet and then pretend they actually care.

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Inside Baseball Stuff About the House Oversight Committee and the Twitter Censorship Hearing


Posted originally on the CTH on February 8, 2023 

CTH has never pretended or played the game of pretending, but several people have discussed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing today on the Twitter censorship issue… and thus, some reminders and clarifications of inside DC politics are needed.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, hereafter called the House Oversight Committee or HOC, has a very specific function in DC circles that apparently too few understand.  Once again, let us be clear while trying to explain decades of false information founded upon arcane legislative outlooks.

This article is specific only to the House Oversight Committee.

Within Washington DC, the HOC has a very specific and unique function.  What Fox News is to corporate conservative punditry, so too is the HOC to the same DC system of pretending.  The House Oversight Committee is the “Chaff and Countermeasures” committee.  The HOC operates for both parties with the same mission.

The House Oversight Committee was/is created by the House legislative leadership to make money for the party in control of the Chair.  When the House Speaker is notified of a DC corruption issue, inside his/her office they will often be heard saying, “give it to oversight.”  The intent of that instruction is to give the issue to the HOC, so they can hold hearings, create soundbites and fundraise from the issue.

Making money for the party in control of the Chair is the primary function of the House Oversight Committee.  The HOC does not exist to create accountability or oversight; the HOC exists to exploit the issue for fundraising and satiate the base voters of the party in control of the Chair.  The HOC presents the illusion of accountability by constructing soundbites and member performances which are then broadcast on television for appearances to the voting audience.  It is essentially theater.

The HOC is a “general oversight’ committee, not a committee of “specific jurisdiction.”  Thus, the HOC is the vehicle where Democrats and Republicans publicly display their political initiatives, frame their narratives and then broadcast them on MSNBC, CNN (Democrats) or FOX NEWS (Republicans).

Depending on the issues at hand, the HOC committee members are generally those performance actors best known to the audience of both parties.  This is not accidental; this is by design.  Again, for emphasis, I am only talking about the HOC, a “generalized oversight” committee. Only this specific committee has this specific mission.

A hot button topic enters the committee ecosphere. Specifically trained staffers and performance artists, uniquely qualified to put on theatrical productions (both parties), are then deployed to assist the representatives in creating the soundbites that hopefully will go viral and assist them with fundraising and opportunities to say, “here’s what we are doing.”   Outlining this construct is not an exhibition in cynicism; this is the reality of what the HOC is designed and created to do.

When you see the HOC performing at their best, you will see lots of soundbites created.

The Chair of the HOC is always part of the House Speaker’s close inner circle.  From that association you will discover by training, by habit, and by consequence, the HOC framework is developed to sustain the process itself as an end result.   The questioning is the sum total of all accountabilities.  The performance is the interview; the conversation is the point; the smoke is the fire.

Oversight, in the HOC framework of narrative creation, has evolved into reveling in the endless process (a fundraising proposition) and, as a consequence, it completely ignores the end point, misses the bottom line, doesn’t actually SEE the subject matter, and never actually applies accountability toward what might be discovered.  This is why you end up with high blood pressure, frustrated with the questions not asked, and throwing bricks at the screen or monitors when viewing.

The point of HOC hearings is to create what are now described as “viral moments” that can be used to generate money.   The second, and lesser objective, is to give the illusion of accountability while not actually ever holding anyone or anything accountable.  See prior HOC reference points like Fast and Furious, IRS targeting, Benghazi which outline the latest intent with the Twitter censorship issue.

If you watch the HOC Twitter hearing through the prism of expecting some form of accountability for the violations of the First Amendment, you will be frustrated and disappointed.   However, if you watch the HOC Twitter hearing through the prism of how well the panelists will do at raising money from their performances, then you can evaluate the effectiveness; the proverbial winning and losing.

The HOC is designed by House leadership to perform the same basic function for both Democrats and Republicans.  The HOC committee assignments are selected based on the theatrical skills of each representative.  This is not to say the motives of the members are sullied or impure, it is simply to point out the motive of the committee itself is to generate fundraising from the skillsets of the members on the committee.

Once you fully grasp what the intent of the House Oversight Committee is about, and once you drop the expectation that any accountability in oversight is the intent, then you can watch the performances through the entertainment prism of partisan politics and genuinely enjoy them.  There are, after all, some exceptional soundbites and moments created by the hearings themselves.

The HOC is called the “Chaff and Countermeasures” Committee, because that’s essentially what the committee does.  It gives the appearance of targeting, steering the target to a controlled destination, and then distracting the audience from the outcome of accountability.

If sunlight is achieved, meaning the Mainstream Media cannot ignore the issue as presented and questioned, and if the general public become more familiar with the controversial subject matter or topic at hand, and if the party of the Chair can fundraise from the issue, then the committee has succeeded.  However, if you are looking for something to change as an outcome of any HOC hearing, you will be disappointed.

All of the insiders in Washington DC know this to be true; but, when discussing the HOC specifically, the insiders cannot violate the DC code and make this reality a part of the public consciousness.  To make this operational mission widely understood is to diminish the financial value of it.

Now, let’s ENJOY:

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