Twitter’s founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has called on the American people to “splinter” the U.S. deep state while evoking former President John F. Kennedy.
Dorsey took to Twitter to call out the U.S. intelligence community while demanding that the federal agencies are dismantled.
“Splinter the CIA, NSA, and FBI into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the winds,” Dorsey wrote.
He accompanied the post with a link to a portrait of JFK, who is believed to have made a similar statement about the CIA.
Kennedy supposedly vowed to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” upon learning of the Bay of Pigs disaster – the agency’s botched effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
However, it’s not entirely clear whether he uttered the oft-cited words at all.
The only source is an anonymous Kennedy administration official who supposedly shared it with a New York Times reporter.
The source reportedly only revealed the quote three years after the president’s assassination.
Splinter the CIA, NSA, and FBI into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the winds. https://t.co/mDRYX1LFld
— jack (@jack) May 24, 2023
Elon Musk, Dorsey’s successor at the helm of Twitter, responded with an even more cryptic post.
Musk replied to Dorsey’s tweet with a single exclamation point.
!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 24, 2023
Musk worked with a group of independent journalists to publish internal Twitter communications.
Those documents, dubbed the “Twitter Files,” have proved that the CIA and FBI had been exerting a strong influence over the censorship practices of the platform.
Along with several other government entities, the two agencies were able to request the removal of individual users and the promotion or suppression of particular narratives.
Since taking over the company, Musk has made a show of distancing himself from that status quo, including by firing general counsel James Baker, who formerly worked for the FBI.
Many Twitter users questioned the sincerity of Dorsey’s apparent rejection of the FBI and CIA, however.
Most were quick to point out that Dorsey allowed the agencies to meddle in the platform while he ran it.
Twitter was one of the few social media platforms to resist participation in the NSA’s controversial PRISM surveillance program over a decade ago.
The social media company’s refusal to participate was revealed in a leaked slide from the agency made public by NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
PRISM gave the NSA a dedicated backdoor to the servers of Big Tech giants including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
A few of Dorsey’s followers appeared to interpret the tweet as an endorsement of Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
RFK Jr., JFK’s nephew, is running on a platform that includes reining in intelligence agencies.
He has publicly stated his belief that the CIA was involved in the murders of both his uncle and his father, former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Sr.
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