From the Tom Woods Letter:
Two items for you today.
(1) Although the Big Tech platforms don’t exactly seem like they have to be dragged kicking and screaming into suppressing unpopular opinions, we keep learning about ways the federal government has been pressuring them to do so.
We found out quite recently that the federal government pressured Twitter to drop Alex Berenson, for example.
The latest case came just the other day, when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Rogan asked him about the Hunter Biden laptop story, and we found out that the FBI had approached Facebook cautioning it against allowing the free dissemination of what it of course called Russian propaganda.
Zuckerberg said:
“The FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that there is about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.
“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said you can’t share this at all. We didn’t do that.”
What they did do, Zuckerberg said, was downgrade posts about the Hunter Biden laptop so that fewer people would see them. When Rogan asked for specific numbers, Zuckerberg said he didn’t know them off the top of his head but conceded that the downgrading was significant.
Zuckerberg went on: “We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country — it’s a very, very impressive law enforcement — they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.”
You think there’s the tiniest chance that the FBI is a political organization?
One favorable development has come from all this, at least: the right side of the ideological divide has rapidly shed its superstitious reverence for agencies like the FBI.
(2) On another note: in case you missed episode 2183 of the Tom Woods Show, I had a chance to speak to Mikkel Thorup, an expert on international relocation and expat issues, having visited 100 countries himself and lived in nine, and an expat himself for over 20 years.
I myself am too much of a homebody to leave the U.S., but I know for a fact that more of my readers than ever are considering their international options, whether that’s outright relocation or measures short of that, like second citizenships and the like.
Mikkel is putting on a free virtual event that I thought you might be interested in. It will cover everything you need to know about the expat life: migration, residencies, citizenship, investment, the expat lifestyle and more.
It’s just been announced that Ron Paul will be speaking, alongside Doug Casey, Liberland founder Vit Jedlicka, and an array of experts whose combined expertise makes this surely the number-one expat event of the year.
If all this arouses your curiosity, you can still access a free ticket to the event at this link: