The FBI is gaslighting the American people over the stunning—if unsurprising—evidence that it engaged in a conspiracy with Big Tech to silence wrongthinkers in violation of the First Amendment, as the Twitter Files have revealed.

Meanwhile, in attacking those who refuse to be gaslit, the bureau is also telegraphing that it would respond to Congress investigating its hyper-politicization and weaponization with relentless information warfare.

The gaslighting comes in the preeminent law enforcement agency’s “move along, nothing to see here” response to the Twitter Files. It stated that “correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements.” The FBI, it says, “provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.”

Here is the kind of conduct the FBI wants you to believe is completely normal:

  • Grooming Twitter executives for months in advance of the release of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story to compel them to kill the story.
  • Referring myriad tweets concerning inherently political matters to Twitter’s censorship team for purging—so many tweets, in fact, that during one such bulk censorship request, a Twitter employee described the review of the “possible violative content” as a “monumental undertaking.”
  • Flagging specific Twitter accounts for the platform to take action against—up to and including suspension—apparently for engaging in thoughtcrime of promoting “civic misinformation” by making jokes related to the 2020 election.
  • Paying Twitter $3.4 million for its time and effort censoring Americans.

When a domestic intelligence agency is making repeated contacts with your executives about “content moderation,” lodging specific censorship requests directly and via cutout—amid pressure from federal lawmakers to do the same—those “requests” start to look a lot more like demands.

The flimsy national security pretext used to justify the FBI’s censorship requests, often targeting random, unpopular accounts, is equally outrageous.

The FBI used allegations of “foreign interference” as a cover to pursue domestic wrongthink, as its 80-agent-strong Foreign Interference Task Force coordinated with Twitter. For their part, Twitter executives seemed to find scant evidence of such interference—a throwback to Russiagate, and the targeting of the Trump campaign on the accusation advisor Carter Page was a Russian asset.

Authorities also apparently sought to treat “election misinformation” as a dire threat—a pretext perhaps more disturbing than the security apparatus’ now-familiar crying wolf over Russian interference.

It’s well known by now that the security state has linked skepticism over election integrity to “insurrection,” and sought to cast skeptics as domestic violent extremists.

But that is only the beginning. Consider the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) position on this matter—one that the FBI seemed to embrace as it participated alongside CISA in meetings with Twitter and other Big Tech companies in the run-up to the 2020 election.

CISA has stretched its mandate of protecting election infrastructure to include targeting purported “mis-, dis-, and malinformation” regarding elections—that is, to combatting ideas it claims threaten physical equipment.

The agency’s director, Jen Easterly, has said that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”

In other words, thought policing is now a national security imperative.

Easterly has pledged that CISA will “work with our partners in the private sector,” including social media companies, “to ensure that the American people have the facts that they need to help protect our critical infrastructure.”

This is exactly what CISA did in conjunction with the FBI and its putatively private sector “partners” in 2020—before Easterly assumed her position.

This “cognitive infrastructure” paradigm is in keeping with President Joe Biden‘s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which prevails today. That document calls for “Enhancing faith in American democracy” by “contend[ing] with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic discourse” rife with “disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media.” The president declared in the strategy that he intends “to counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.”

Given the security state’s meddling with America’s digital public square in 2020, imagine what it is up to now.

This brings us to the FBI’s telegraphing of a relentless information operation to come. The bureau claimed, in response to the Twitter Files, that its collusion with Twitter was completely above board, and “conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

The agency, in other words, isn’t in the wrong. You are, for pointing out its discrediting behavior. And what’s more, as America faces a “dangerous pandemic of mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” you may well be a contributor to domestic violent extremism, if not a terrorist yourself.

This echoes the FBI’s messaging in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago raid, when it played the victim, while chiding critics of that unprecedented act and claiming they posed a threat to law enforcement.

Such a response can only have two possible explanations: either the FBI can’t defend its behavior, or it genuinely believes that behavior to be legitimate.

Either would be disastrous for this country.

As evidence of FBI corruption continues to emerge, Senator Josh Hawley has said we need to “have a conversation about [its] future,” and endorsed a Church-style Commission to investigate its activities.

House conservatives have demanded the next speaker establish such a panel.

Incoming House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) recently called for Congress to withhold all funds from the FBI until it can get to the bottom of the agency’s collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans.

As such threats to bring transparency and accountability to the FBI grow, it and other agencies will get more aggressive in their attacks on critics.

Courageous leaders must prepare for an onslaught of information warfare aimed at discrediting them and their effort to bring to justice those in a security apparatus run amok—to seek the truth, unbowed.

A return to law and order in this country depends on it.

Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.