Catholic Priest DEFROCKED

Hi guys. Welcome to The Liz Wheeler Show. I’m Liz Wheeler. If you haven’t already subscribed to this show, please do so. Would you, would you mind? Just pick up your phone, go to Apple Podcast. If you have an iPhone, go to Spotify. If you have an Android, click that subscribe button, head over to YouTube and click subscribe over there. And also ring that bell so I can notify you every time I have a new episode that drops, or an interview or a video that I think you might like. Do the same on Rumble, Rumble.com/LizWheeler for fully uncensored video versions of the show. Hit that subscribe button. There’s also a little red button next to the subscribe button on Rumble that allows you to join the Liz Wheeler Show community on Locals for free. I humbly invite you to be part of this community.

We have a ton of fun over there, so I don’t think you will regret it. Also, if you use my promo code, which is MERRY, M-E-R-R-Y, then you get a great deal to become a VIP on The Liz Wheeler Show community on Locals. You get the first three months for free. If you use my promo code MERRY. You can just go to LizWheelerShow.com/Locals to join us over there. It’s a great way to end this year and start next year. Okay, so what are we going to talk about today? The reason I’m smiling right now is because, full disclosure, my team is not convinced that you are going to be interested in the topic that I wanted to talk about tonight, that I want to talk about today. But here’s the thing. I actually find this very interesting.

I care about this topic a lot. I’ve been following detail by detail as this unfolds. So if you’re not interested in this, just hear me out because I think I’ll be able to convince you that I am. Like, how can you not be interested in this? Father Frank Pavone, maybe you’re familiar with him, maybe you’re not. He’s the head of Priests for Life. He’s kind of a big figure in the pro-life movement. He’s been around as long as I can remember in the pro-life movement. He heads up this non-profit organization, Priests for Life. He was defrocked by the Vatican. That means that he was dismissed from the priesthood. Now, if you’re not Catholic, maybe this isn’t as shocking as I feel that it is about this, but you can’t just stop being a priest when you are a Catholic. Maybe a minister and another religion can choose to be a minister as a job and then stop being a minister if he wants to be.

But in, in the Catholic faith, it’s a vow for life. It’s a sacrament. Holy orders. And for the Vatican to dismiss Father Frank Pavone from the priesthood, I wanna talk about this. I wanna talk about why this happened. Was this political targeting from perhaps a corrupted hierarchy in the Catholic church? Was this disproportionate to the wrongdoings that Father Frank Pavone has been not just accused of engaging in, I guess he was actually convicted in the Catholic, Catholic church’s version of a court. Meaning it’s not a civil crime by American legal standards, but it’s a crime in the Catholic Church. Was this, was this dismissal deserved? What does this mean for the pro-life movement? I find this to be a just absolutely fascinating. So I wanna, I wanna walk you through, I’ve had different viewpoints about this action in the last couple hours.

I swayed one way and then I swayed the other way. So I wanna just walk through what I’m thinking about this. Also, I wanna talk with you about the latest batch of Twitter files coming in hot over the weekend with what I think is an understated bombshell. The headlines about the latest batch of Twitter files was about the FBI colluding with Twitter or the Department of Homeland Security colluding with Twitter in order to censor American citizens, particularly conservatives, people talking about COVID, people talking about election integrity. But that’s a big deal. It is a huge deal. Of course, we knew that was true. It’s great to see the receipts, it’s great to have proof of this. This is actually proof of criminality, whereas some of the other Twitter files showed gross targeting, partisan targeting. This is actually proof of criminality. But there was another kind of hidden bombshell revelation in the Twitter files that I wanna talk about in a little bit more detail. It’s actually the justification that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security used for their collusion with Twitter in order to censor people’s tweets that didn’t align with the Joe Biden administration narrative. So we’re gonna talk about that. Also, we have to talk about Elon Musk’s poll, we’ll talk about this quickly. Elon Musk’s poll asking whether he should step down as the head of Twitter. People are overreacting to this, and I will tell you why. Well, right now, let’s get to it.

Okay, before we get to the Frank Pavone controversy, let’s talk about this poll for a second. This is what Elon Musk posted on Twitter. He said, should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of the poll. So at first glance, I gotta admit it. First glance, I thought, WTF Elon, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? I voted no, you shouldn’t step down. And I told him why. I said, no, I think you’re doing a good job. I think that you are doing a vital service to our nation by exposing this Marxist apparatus of censorship that is attempting to control our thoughts, our words, our minds, our ideology, and ultimately the outcome of our culture, and therefore, our governmental institutions in our nation. I said, not a lot of politicians even are fighting the fight that you’re fighting keep on.

And I do think that he should keep on, I think that he’s made some changes to Twitter that I don’t like, but the things I don’t like that he’s doing are minuscule and cosmetic compared to what he is doing for Twitter compared to all this exposing of this swamp, which we’ll talk about a little bit later in the show. But here’s, here’s the thing. I think people are overreacting to this poll and here’s why. This is not a question that came out of the blue. This is not a question that he’s sitting there wondering if he should step down and then leaving it to popular vote on Twitter. Come on, guys. You have to know better than that. Elon Musk already has someone picked out to take over the reins of Twitter. His intention was never to run Twitter forever.

His intention was to buy this company, to shake it up, to try to get rid of the corruption, detoxify the entire apparatus, and then hand it off to somebody, a CEO, who he could trust somebody who wasn’t woke, someone who wasn’t going to collude with the FBI. And clearly this poll is an indication that he has that person and he is ready to hand over the reins to that person. Now, I confess, I’m a little surprised it’s happening this quickly. He hasn’t had Twitter from for long. I wish that he would hold on to the reins, the day-to-day operation for a little bit longer, get Twitter on its free speech feet before he hands it over to someone else. I think that in this case, Elon’s fame, his near universal name recognition is working in his favor because he is able to get the attention of the entire world when he exposes this corruption.

But I don’t know, I don’t think that he’s sitting there wondering whether he should step down or not and then leaving this to public opinion. He’s not stupid, not stupid at all. He already has someone. And now it’s just a matter of, you know, this is a good marketing trick, right? He’s getting tons of engagement, tons of votes, tons of news stories before he’s ever announced that he’s, that he’s stepping down. He’s actually one of the best PR. He’s one of the, he has one of the best PR skills that I’ve ever seen. I’ll throw a name out there as a prediction. A name of someone who has said that he’s interested in being c e o of Twitter. So maybe the fact that he’s said it publicly is not a good indication that Elon was already talking to him. But there’s been speculation that this might be Blake Masters.

We’ll have to see. But mark my words, when Elon makes this announcement, it’s gonna be obvious that this, it was not based. His answer was not based on this question. All right, more on Twitter in a little while, but I wanna talk about Frank Pavone for a second. So, Frank Pavone Catholic Priest, the head of the nonprofit organization, Priests for Life, this is like a tens of millions of dollars nonprofit, by the way, this is quite a large organization. And Frank Pavone was defrocked by the Vatican. In some senses this came out of the blue, meaning there weren’t a lot of articles or online chatter or conversation or controversy leading up to this. So when I saw the announcement, it was from Catholic News agency. When they announced this, I was like, what, what? This is out of the blue. And of course, scrambling to look for details cuz you always wanna know whoever publishes an exclusive, what their agenda is, who they talk to, what their source is.

There wasn’t a lot of information in this. So I went searching for information to see if I could find some facts. Well, it turns out that it, the report itself is accurate. The Vatican has dismissed Frank Pavone from the priesthood. So he is no longer Father Frank Pavone. He is Mr. Frank Pavone. Now the reason for this, they said he has no opportunity to appeal. The reason for this is that he’s been convicted in the Catholic church. It’s not, it’s not a civil litigation in the American legal system, but the Catholic church has convicted him of blasphemy on social media and repeated disobedience to his Bishop. Now again, anybody who’s not familiar with how the Catholic church works, their, clerical hierarchy. Don’t worry, I’m not about to get nerdy on this. All I’m going to say is that priests are subject to ecclesiastic authority, meaning priests take a vow of obedience to their bishops.

So this is a big deal in, in the Catholic church if a priest disobeys a bishop. And this is actually the thing about this story. It, at first glance sounds like this really bombastic political targeting. This corrupt Catholic church targeting a pro-life activist in the wake of Roe v. Wade, probably because he is pro-life, and maybe because some of the hierarchy of the church tend to be social justice-y and liberal, and don’t wanna offend people by actually talking about the biblical truths about marriage, about sex, about abortion, blah, blah, blah. And those, maybe that is the two options, right? Maybe the two options are a corrupt hierarchy of the church targeting Frank Pavone because he’s pro-life and an open Trump supporter, or the other option is he is a rogue priest facing his due discipline.

It’s hard to tell what the truth is, but from the information that we have right now, in a way, both of these conclusions seem to be accurate. And again, I have to preface this by saying we need way, way, way more details, more facts before we could possibly tell whether this is a proportionate reaction to disobedience or whether this is a disproportionate targeting based on politics. So I applied my contacts, if you will. I talked to some canon lawyers. Canon lawyers are exactly what they sound like. Their lawyers trained in the law of the Catholic church. They represent priests in these proceedings. I talked to some canon lawyers. I talked to some priests who are not associated whatsoever with Frank Pavone. Just to get their insider view on this. I talked to innumerable active Catholics like myself to get people’s takes. And there’s really, all people have all kinds of theories about what went down.

No one really knows the facts here, but there are all kinds of theories from suicide by cop. Someone suggested now suicide by cop, if you’re not familiar with this is the phenomenon where a person commits a crime knowing that that that crime will result in use of lethal force against them, knowing that a police officer will shoot them if they commit this crime. And they do this deliberately because, you know, suicide and they want it blamed on cops. So I don’t buy this particularly, I guess the theory of suicide by cops in the case of Frank Pavone would be, oh, he didn’t wanna be a priest anymore. And you can’t just, as a priest, you can’t just stop being a priest. The only way that you can stop being a priest is if you are dismissed from the priesthood by the Vatican.

I think that’s a little fantastical. I don’t think that there’s particularly evidence. I mean, Frank Pavone is 63 years old, and he’s lived his entire life as a Catholic priest. I hardly think that he was trying to get away from the priesthood. But that’s one of the theories. I mean, the other theory is of course, persecution because he’s pro-life. And I think that there could be, there could be an element of that. This one, I think this is another practical reason, something that could be at play here. The Catholic Church is very afraid of losing their tax exempt status when they have priests who are affiliated with the Catholic church, as Frank Pavone was when they become very political and Frank Pavone openly on social media and publicly urged Catholics to vote for the Republican Party and actively endorsed and supported President Trump.

And as an individual, he’s allowed to do that. Of course, anybody is, but as a priest in his capacity as a priest, he is not allowed to direct people to vote for a particular candidate or a particular political party. If he does, then he puts the tax exempt status of the Catholic church at risk. So maybe that’s a very practical, like very, very practical kind of reason. But it is, it is a working theory. There are also a lot of people in the Catholic community who think that this was deserved, who think that Frank Pavone acted against his vows as a priest, while simultaneously doing good things in the pro-life movement. Both can be true and a lot of people in the Catholic community think that he deserved this and that it doesn’t contradict the fact that the hierarchy of the Catholic church can be corrupt.

That both things can be true. It’s not mutually exclusive. That is my personal opinion on this matter. I think that Frank Pavone was targeted because he’s pro-life. I think Frank Pavone was targeted because he supported Trump verbally. And there’s examples of priests who have been openly political as they’re not supposed to do, but they’ve supported leftists, they’ve supported Obama. For example, there was a priest in Chicago named Father Pfleger who was on Obama’s interfaith commission or committee or whatever he called it. He was part of the Obama campaign. And he wasn’t defrocked, he wasn’t dismissed from priesthood. He’s not treated the same way. There’s another, there’s another Catholic priest who is on social media all the time. His name is father James Martin. And he’s, he’s this close to being heretical if he’s not already heretical. His actively pro LGBTQ agenda, not just the Catholic church position, which is every person, regardless of who they’re attracted to is, is a person of dignity and value made in the image of God.

And that you’re not defined by your sexual attraction. And that sexual attraction itself is not sin, it’s the decision you make about what to do with that sexual attraction that constitutes a sin or not. That’s the view of the Catholic church. But Father James Martin advocates for essentially what the radical leftists are advocating for when it comes to the LGBTQ ideology, the LGBTQ lobby not been, he’s not been targeted the way that Frank Pavone has been from the Catholic church hierarchy. And again, I say all of these things having read and talked to many priests, many people active in the church who think that those comparisons are unfair, who think that those comparisons don’t hold water because the behavior of Pfleger in Chicago in the Obama campaign or James Martin on Twitter being pro LGBTQ ideology are different than Frank Pavone’s disobedience to his bishop.

So this is what a couple of canon lawyers had to say about the legal nuances of this. And I think this is the reason why, guys, by the way, that my team was like, I don’t know if anyone else besides you cares about the nitty gritty of the Catholic church and the legality. And I thought, I think you guys do. I thought you would because in a sense, every large organization, especially ones with cultural influence, and the Catholic church obviously has enormous cultural influence, arguably more influence in our culture than any other non-governmental institution on Earth. And when there’s an institution like that, and there’s an element of that institution that is so good and so true and so beautiful and so, right. And there’s another element of that institution that has been infiltrated by an ideology that is against what is true and good and beautiful and right.

I thought, of course this is right up the alley of what we talk about all the time. We often talk about this with Marxists infiltrating the school system or communists infiltrating the banking institution or, you know, the Klaus Schwabs and the Black Rocks, et cetera, et cetera. This is the same. There’s an element of radical ideology that has pervaded the hierarchy of the Catholic church for the exact same reason that the Marxists pursue children, because the Marxists pursue either truth so that they can destroy it or pursue the most vulnerable so that they can be corrupted. And so I thought you’d be interested in this if you’re not, well, you’ll have to hang on in about five more minutes, we’ll get back to the Twitter stuff. But this is what a couple of the canon lawyers said. Ed Condon said on Twitter speaking in the abstract.

And as a canonist who’s done more than a few cases, apart from in cases of crimes against minors, it’s almost never the thing that gets you laicized. That means dismissed from the priesthood. It’s the refusal afterwards over a period of years to conform to legitimate instructions. Okay, well that’s an interesting take, which we’re gonna unpack in just a second. There is another priest by the name of Father Thomas Petri. He’s a doctor of moral theology. And he said a priest is not dismissed for being passionately pro-life. He’s not even dismissed for blasphemy alone. Dismissal comes after years of flouting legitimate instructions of his superiors. Other priests who have issues are still usually obedient to their legitimate superiors. That’s about the same take, right, from two different people. Father Pius Piek who has adopted in canon law, gave this quote to Pillar Catholic. He said, the theology of the priesthood has never been that priests are just independent sacramental ministers, rather priests are constantly understood.

And this is emphasized in the Second Vatican Council, as cooperators with the bishops so that you cannot even conceive of priestly ministry disconnected from ecclesiastical authority. In fact, Pietryzyk added, the oldest translation of the word bishop is overseer, and every priest needs an overseer, a bishop or someone entrusted with authority to oversee him. Okay, so this is where we get into the nuance of this actual case against Frank Pavone, his behavior. So just to give you a picture of what he has done or what his ministry has been, he is not a pastor. He does not have a parish. He’s not a teacher, an educator. He runs the nonprofit Priests for Life, which has a an amazing mission to be pro-life. To be outspoken about being pro-life is not easy. And he’s done incredible work in this area. At the same time, those two things that I mentioned at the beginning, that he is not a pastor and he doesn’t have a parish are important things because ultimately his nonprofit organization is at least in the priesthood known as a side gig.

It is sec of secondary importance to the priesthood. And if he does not have pastoral duties as a priest, then why be a priest? Why be a priest? It’s always a little bit of a sticky business for priests to have side gigs. Not that many of them don’t do it well, but it’s always a little bit sticky because of how to prioritize your priestly obligations versus your non priestly obligations. And perhaps in this case, this is where the conflict from which it stems. This is the root of the conflict. So before we get to the obedience issue, let’s talk about the blasphemy. What’s the blasphemy here? So the blasphemy is widely understood to be we don’t have the documents from the court case. So maybe there’s more information on this that I don’t have. I fully acknowledge that we are lacking in every fact that goes into this case.

But what it appears to be is the fact that Pavone tweeted, and if you have children in the room, I mean this isn’t that bad, but you’re probably gonna wanna move away from him for a second. He tweeted goddamn towards the Democrats towards Joe Biden. And that of course is blasphemy in the Catholic church. I mean, it’s a violation, right? Of the 10 Commandments. Thou shall not take the Lord’s name in vain. And it’s an oath using the name of the Lord. This is serious, this is grave, this is not good. This is not good coming from a priest. Now, does it mean that the priest should be defrocked? No, I mean, obviously not, not in and of itself, but to what we understand at this point, in this case, this is what it refers to.

There’s also been the matter of in the lead up to the 2016 election, Frank Pavone used the dead body of a baby who was miscarried, put the remains of this child on an altar. And in this video, it was really disturbing. I remember watching it at the time. And in this video used this baby to make a point about abortion and a point about Catholics not voting for Democrats who support abortion. And he later denied that the altar on which he had laid the remains of this child was an altar. He said it was a table, but it was also a table that he used to say, mass for the employees of priests for life. So maybe this is potato, potato here. It, it was, you know, a a table set aside for use as an altar. And I’m not really sure that that getting into the nuances of that is the point.

But this was, this was the desecration of the remains of a child. Even if you’re pro-life, even if you agree with his point that Catholics shouldn’t vote Democrat because the Democrats support abortion, I agree with that point. This was clearly crossing a line. This was not appropriate behavior. He then endorsed Trump directly, which again, is against what he’s allowed to do as a priest. And it puts the tax exempt status of the Catholic church in jeopardy here. And this is where we get to the obedience part. So having done these sort of rogue things, the side gig, the tweeting personal things, tweeting oaths using the Lord’s name in vain on Twitter, this baby body on an altar, this political endorsement of Trump. This is when his bishop stepped in and in a sense, Frank Pavone refused to have a bishop.

So the word in the Catholic church, I am gonna get nerdy on for a second. This I think you’ll find interesting. The word in the Catholic church is incardinated. Incardinated means where’s your, your home in the Catholic church, you know, what diocese are you rooted to? What diocese are you rooted to? And Frank Pavone was originally in the Diocese of New York, but he requested a transfer when he started having issues, when his pro-life work became in conflict with the Bishop of New York. He requested a transfer to a Diocese of Amarillo, the Diocese of Amarillo in Texas. Now this is very unusual for a priest to request a transfer of diocese. This was granted he was transferred to the diocese Amarillo, but once he was there, he started receiving questions from the bishop there about the finances of Priests for life.

And it was then that the bishop claimed, and I don’t know whether this part is true, I was not part of this, I was not privy to this encounter between the Bishop and Frank Pavone. I don’t know. But this is where the bishop said that Frank Pavone, the way that he was operating priests for life financially was questionable. I can’t even comment on, on whether I think that’s true or whether I think that’s not true. I have no idea if that is true. I have no idea if that’s political targeting, which is why this whole situation is a little bit sticky. Because if Frank Pavone was operating priests for life above board financially, then yeah, this looks like political targeting. But if he wasn’t, if there was some financial problem with Priests for Life and his bishop told him to stop doing what he was doing and to give him more financial information and Pavone refused, then that is disobedience to your ecclesiastical authority and grounds for disciplinary action just like this.

But the result, we know one thing, when Frank Pavone was in this interaction with the diocese of Amarillo, instead of trying to clear it up, he requested another transfer. He requested a transfer to the diocese in Colorado Springs. But that’s not all. That’s not all. Follow along with this. After Frank Pavone requested a transfer to Colorado Springs, then the paper trail, if you will, just goes dark. We don’t really know if that, if that what happened to that request. We don’t know where Frank Pavone is, is what diocese he’s incarnated at. And this is odd because when you have these sort of autonomous priests, the way that these priests are held accountable in the hierarchy of the church would be if they misbehave in some way, then you would have the Catholic laity would have recourse in talking to the bishop. But if you don’t know who the bishop of the priest is, then how can how can that priest be held accountable?

And that’s the thing, Frank Pavone, we don’t know who his bishop was. We don’t know where he was incardinated, he never said, in fact, even his lawyer was a little dodgy about answering this question. And so the question in Orthodox Catholic circles is did he even have a bishop or had he completely gone rogue? Again, we don’t know, we don’t have the answers to all of this, but it seems like in some ways, and again, if you’re Protestant, if you’re evangelical, if you don’t believe in the hierarchy of the Catholic church, then maybe this doesn’t seem as big of a deal because in other churches, non-denominational churches, a minister can stop being a minister if he wants, if he doesn’t like a boss, he can quit and he can go independent. But that’s not how it works. In the Catholic church, in the Catholic church, priests are accountable to their bishops.

They have taken a vow of obedience to ecclesiastical authority, which is their bishop. And it appears that Frank Pavone went rogue. And here’s the thing, I empathize with him because there are elements of the hierarchy of the Catholic church that have been corrupted. They’ve been corrupted by leftist ideology. And social justice is a good example of that. This socialist, economic ideology, redistribute the wealth that’s packaged as charity. It’s not, it’s the opposite. It’s government forcing people to give away their stuff, whereas charity is the individual making that decision of their own volition to share their wealth, their, their goods, their time, their talent with other people. But the Catholic church, there’s this element of it that’s been corrupted by this deliberately twisted definition of personal charity and of caring for the poor. That’s certainly true. There’s an element of the church that’s been twisted or that’s been infected with an environmentalist ideology.

I say all this as a practicing Catholic who loves being Catholic. I love the church, I love her doctrine. I love her ideology. I love her longevity, I love her tradition, I love her teaching. But the church itself built on God’s word is run by fallen men because all men have sin and fallen short of the glory of God. So there’s always going to be corruption in any organization that is run by men because men are sinners. And I’m talking about mankind. I’m not talking about man versus woman. I’m talking about human beings. And so it seems that Frank Pavone felt that bad decisions, or what he considered to be bad decisions by his superiors, by his bishops, somehow relieved him from the duty to obey his superiors. And in many circumstances outside the priesthood, that would be true. But in the priesthood, that’s not how it works.

In fact, this is kind of the attitude that Luther had. And I know that I have a lot of, a lot of people that listen to this show who are not Catholic, who Protestant, who are Evangelical, who don’t have a problem with Luther. But from the perspective of Catholics, one of the problems with what Luther did is he broke off from the Catholic church instead of trying to reform it from within. Whereas the Catholic church teaches you reform from within because the Bible calls for unity among Christians. So what Frank Pavone is doing is maybe feeling like his disagreement with his bishop relieves him of the duty to obey, which makes what he’s doing no different than what Luther did when he broke off. Because if you break off, if you refuse a bishop, if you refuse ecclesiastical authority, you are essentially breaking off from the church.

That’s a very dangerous road, a very dangerous road that I don’t recommend any priest go down. This is my take, this is just my take. There could be more facts that come out. There could be more information that comes out one way could, you know, we could find out that this is entirely corruption from the church, entirely targeting of Frank Pavone, or we could find out that no, you know what, there was a lot going on behind the scenes, a lot more disobedience than we first thought. But the reason I wanted to talk about this with you is because I find it really, really interesting and because there’s a lot of speculation online about what this is all about. And I think some people are in such a hurry to draw one conclusion or the other to either dismiss Frank Pavone completely or dismiss the church completely.

They’re, they’re kind of missing this whole sloppy mix together. Both things are true at once. So yeah, there we go. So speaking of the swamp, let’s talk about Twitter for a second. The Twitter files. So we had two batches of Twitter files over the weekend, one on Sunday night and one on Friday. The one on Sunday was, it was an addendum that Matt Taby posted showing that the intelligence community was also essentially colluding with Twitter. Shocker there because this whole intelligence apparatus is corrupt. But that built on what we found out on Friday. What we found out on Friday is that the FBI specifically and the Department of Homeland Security colluded with Twitter to censor American citizens based on if the American citizens were saying anything that contradicted Biden’s radical leftist ideology. So if you tweeted something about election integrity, you tweeted something about covid, the FBI contacted Twitter and told Twitter to please censor this person.

So Matt Taibbi, these a couple of the most significant revelations that Matt Tabby posted. He said, a surprisingly high number are, he’s talking about emails received by Twitter from the FBI, a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low follower accounts. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content. I think that’s very interesting by the way, because one of the things that we have seen time and time again is the federal government try to camouflage the fact that they are essentially violating the constitutional rights of citizens, meaning the federal government’s not allowed to tell to censor us. So they use, whether it’s big tech, whether it’s these, these think tanks, whether it’s these security contracting partners, they use those entities to do their dirty work for them.

This is just more proof of that. Another tweet from Matt Taibbi says Hello Twitter contacts the master canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter came through in this November 20th, 2022 email in which FBI San Francisco is notifying you. That’s a quote, it wants action on four accounts. The FBI had the gall to just claim to Twitter. We’re notifying you. We want you to take action on these four accounts and then listed the four accounts. That is direct targeting. Taibbi then says in an internal email from November 5th, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the San Francisco Field Office a long list of accounts that quote, may warrant additional action. Agent Elvis Chan, remember that name. Funny, funny thing about him in a minute. Agent Elvis Chan passed the list onto his quote Twitter folks, in a letter to deputy or to former Deputy general counsel and former top FBI lawyer Jim Bakker on September 16th, 2022, legal executive Stacia Cardille outlines results from her quote, soon-to-be weekly meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

So let’s put a pin on that for a second. We have top executives at Twitter, who are having weekly meetings with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And the FBI has the audacity to claim that this is not collusion? Give me a break. The only way that anybody believes this believes the FBI’s denial, I should say, is because it’s almost unbelievable the level of lying the FBI engages in. And some people just don’t believe that other people would lie to that extent. So they think, well it must not, it must be true because the FBI wouldn’t lie to that extent. But lemme me tell you, they do. TAE goes on to say the FBI in one case sent over so many possible violative content reports.

Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the monumental undertaking of reviewing them. There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government flagged reports. This letter from agent Elvis Chan to Yoel Roth references Teleporter a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI. Twitter, for instance, received reports via the partner support portal. An outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the Department of Homeland Security. Oh, what a tangled web, right? The takeaway, Taibbi says at the end, what most people think of as the deep state is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and sometimes state funded NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless. So all of this is very important, right? All of this is, in my opinion, evidence of criminality. If the federal government is violating the First Amendment right of American citizens, their right to free speech, they’re not allowed to do that.

There should be legal accountability, legal repercussions, criminal penalties for government agents that violate private citizens’ constitutionally protected rights. Period. This is very cut and dry. This is very black and white. This is not nuanced. This is not a private company that’s, are they a public forum? Are they not a public forum? No. This is government involvement. This is bad. It is wrong and there must be accountability. But this is maybe not even the biggest revelation in this Twitter thread. There was an understated revelation in Matt Taibbi’s Twitter files that didn’t get a lot of attention. I don’t know why. This is what stuck out to me the most of anything else. This is what he wrote. He said, the ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s in anomalous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state. He said, while the Department of Homeland Security in its products pans permissive social media for offering operational advantages to Russians, it also explains that the domestic violent extremist threat requires addressing information gaps. Guys, do you know what this means? The FBI used the fake Russia collusion hoax that they concocted as justification to police speech on Twitter in the name of preventing foreign interference.

Even though the Russia collusion hoax was bought and paid for by the FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The enormity of this, Matt Taibbi’s word, I’m gonna use the same word. It cannot be overstated. The Russia collusion hoax was not true. It was false, it was debunked, it was made up. Even a Robert Mueller who was a swamp creature said it wasn’t true. Trump was not a tool of Putin. There was no Russia collusion. Yet the FBI used their invented, their weaponization of the federal government, their lie as an excuse for doing the same thing on Twitter. And Twitter just fell for it. And then the Department of Homeland Security took it a step further and said, well the threat of this now, not in the form of Russia, but in the form of these, these domestic militia violent extremists, you know, the parents who wanna take go over school board slots. Those folks, the people who fly the don’t tread on me flag. Those folks requires addressing information gaps. What the heck does that mean? That means going a step further than just outright censorship, and actually directing what are supposed to think. Censorship is bad, and it’s evil. Propaganda on top of censorship is tyrannical.

That’s what we’re seeing from the FBI. That’s what we’re seeing from the Department of Homeland Security. That’s what they were coercing Twitter to take part in. That’s extremely dangerous. That’s one of the reasons I want Elon Musk to stay on as the Head of Twitter because he for right now, for whatever reason, has a singular understanding of how to put an end to this. I have not seen any other person, any other politician, even on the right fight this fight the way that he is fighting this fight. The FBI agent, who was constantly communicating with Yoel Roth, his name is Elvis Chan. Check out this signature. This is at the bottom of his emails. Look at that. Bottom line pronouns. He him his. What a loser. Pronouns. What a loser. Somehow this shouldn’t surprise us, guys. This should not surprise us. Alright, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.