Wikileaks is Now Stuck Under the Clutches of Donald Trump (via Elon Musk)
WE said it many times before. We'll say it again. Wikileaks needs to leave Twitter (X), funded by assassins of critics. Twitter (X) is the opposite of free speech. Wikileaks needs to leave. The sooner, the better. One person asked me: "Will the new administration finally pardon [Julian] Assange now?"
Well, it was Biden who worked to set him free; Trump's administration kidnapped him, put him in a high-security prison (via British authorities, Trump's Conservative friends), then sought to prosecute and extradite him - something that Obama reportedly refused to do as it would set a really bad precedent. The Attorney General of Trump said capturing Assange was a priority. This is all a matter of public record.
But this is where things get weird. What does it mean to Wikileaks now that Trump is expecting inauguration (without a January mob trying to steal elections)? Under both the Obama and Trump administrations we saw the US government targeting key Wikileaks people - including staff - till they resigned or burned out. We didn't quite see that under Biden, who had previously (around 2010) dubbed Assange a "high-tech terrorist".
That's not to say Biden was good to Assange or to Wikileaks. But he could be a lot worse.
I sort of realise, reluctantly, that Wikileaks is more or less dead. For years now it's just some Twitter account (nothing new gets published in the Wikileaks site - a site that has very old Web pages and some vanish/rot away).
Wikileaks has not published anything new in a very long time (site online, but it is not an active site) and all Assange has to offer now are old his "trench stories"... in few public talks that he gives (so far this year only one talk and no interviews). Assange no longer "plays" social control media.
An associate of ours said that Wikileaks "is feeding Musk's political ambitions by keeping that account active [in "X"]. It's not a good thing that Musk will soon be running the US government..."
Over the past year or so Wikileaks has said almost nothing about Ukraine and Russia. It's almost like it's subconsciously trying to distract from what Russia did to Ukraine, which hadn't even provoked Russia.
Worse yet, our concern is that Wikileaks will learn that boosting pro-Trump stuff drives more "engagement" (curated by Musk's company) and might follow through with more and more such Trump stuff.
Our associate said that maybe Musk "will pardon Assange instead," but that was just a joke about Musk controlling Trump, having bribed people to vote for Trump and manipulated "X" to promote Trump, even by recklessly relaying pro-Trump falsehoods. "Trump and Musk are "move fast and break stuff" types," Ryan says, "but the federal courts are not going to allow most of this. I'm not a "Move fast and break stuff." type myself. I'm a "Move fast, but then check everything 10 times to make sure it's right." type of person. Precisely because it's when you move fast and don't worry about quality, that's when a lot of it ends up being lost. In the short run you do a lot of things, but then you get to watch while an unacceptably high amount of work is irreparably damaged."
Wikileaks risks tarnishing its old reputation.
"I'd argue that Wikileaks is one of the reasons why there are Russians in Ukraine right now," Ryan adds. "Hillary Clinton is a bad person, but she would have likely given Ukraine the weapons packages that might have arrived in time to do a better job of dissuading the Russians. Or costing them more if they did invade. Trump held it all up and demanded that they help him dig dirt on the Bidens. Wikileaks made all those dumps, but it worked to help Donald Trump get elected the first time. [...] I don't think that Assange pissed off Trump. I think Trump wanted him to be neutralized so he wouldn't be in a position to do anything else for a while. Forcing him to hide in an embassy did that pretty well."
Well, 2 years after becoming President, Trump sent Assange to a prison where he could barely even use pen and paper. Prior to that Trump's team wanted to murder Assange inside the embassy (British authorities declined as it would harm London's reputation for relative safety). █