Charlottesville Lawfare Circus: Twitter Subpoenaed

I received the following email in my inbox yesterday, and just noticed it:

Dear Twitter User:

We are writing to inform you that Twitter received the attached legal process, dated January 30, 2018, requesting information regarding your Twitter account, @MatthewParrott.

The request is in an action entitled: Elizabeth Sines, et al. v. Jason Kessler, et al.

This action is pending in: United States District Court, Western District of Virginia

The attorney(s) representing subpoenaing party is: Philip M. Bowman

Twitter has not disclosed any information regarding your account at this time. However, we wanted to bring this matter to your attention. Please be advised that Twitter may be obligated to produce basic subscriber information related to your account in the future. Accordingly, please advise within 14 days from the date of this notice, from the email address associated with your Twitter account, @MatthewParrott, if you intend to appear in this matter or file a motion to quash. Please also provide us with copies of any papers you file with the Court. If you plan to have your attorney contact us, please first respond to this email from the email address associated with your Twitter account, @MatthewParrott, letting us know that your attorney will be contacting us and providing us with your attorney’s name and contact information.

While we cannot give you any legal advice, we suggest that you seek your own counsel in this matter. If you need assistance seeking counsel, you may consider contacting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance[eff.org],info@eff.org, +1 415-436-9333) or the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/affiliates[aclu.org], +1 212-549-2500).

For more general information on legal requests, please refer to the following Help Center article: https://t.co/lrfaq.

Sincerely,

Twitter Legal

Attached is a 13 page legal document demanding that Twitter turn over not only our tweets but our direct messages to the legal team attempting to sue us for attempting to attend a permitted heritage event in Charlottesville: Plaintiff’s Subpoena for Documents to Twitter, Inc. This is part of an ongoing fishing expedition where they’re desperately looking for some sort of evidence of a criminal conspiracy to initiate violence in Charlottesville.

They’ll find nothing here, either. We even publicly published our event coordination notes leading up to the event, featuring such gems as “As a reminder to all attendees, if the enemy comes to oppose us, we must under all circumstances follow the law and work to deescalate conflict. Do not bring any weapons, tools, or implements that are illegal.” and “Under no circumstances will we aim to provoke or incite conflict.”

I’m a bit embarrassed by this line, “Our intel suggests at this moment that our numbers will be strong enough and law enforcement will be numerous enough that the event will only have some isolated scuffles, if anything.” We knew there would be literally hundreds and hundreds of cops, and I mistakenly thought that was evidence that they intended to maintain law and order. I immediately followed my misplaced optimism with, “We’re necessarily preparing for the worst.”

In the final dispatch, for good measure, I added, “TradWorker can’t and won’t ask anybody to break the law.” We couldn’t and we didn’t, and the leftists pursuing their legal harassment strategies damn well know that. They know our men were only defending themselves, both in the garage and everywhere else as law enforcement explicitly demanded that we go through the hostile opposition. They couldn’t beat us in the streets, so now they’re trying to beat us in the courtroom. But they’ll fail in that venue, as well.

Essentially, they know they don’t have a case, but they have unlimited financial resources and they’re leveraging them with the hopes that we’ll eventually trip ourselves up on a technicality or run out of funds for our legal support. This has been done in conjunction with the “no platform” policy of the Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter (FAGAT) oligopoly’s campaign to remove all of our fundraising and crowdfunding services. Like with Trump and the Russia investigation, they know there’s no crime, but they’re optimistic that we can get tricked into making a procedural error while defending ourselves from the accusation.

Our organization will be fine, and I’ll be fine. I don’t even know how much effort to put into this, given that I’m confident that our Twitter accounts are completely devoid of any incriminating material whatsoever. But it’s about the precedent of it. The ACLU and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) exist to ensure that massive multinational corporations and major law firms can’t leverage their superior resources to deny basic civil liberties. The ACLU has already aligned with the multinationals, but there are some promising signs that the EFF may realize what’s at stake and weigh in on our side.

The curious thing is that my @MatthewParrott account was barely active, and was actually created for apolitical commentary. Twitter clearly went above and beyond their usual censorship system to look for me in particular and drive me off of their platform. This was not the work of a Filipino single mom who’s paid $1/hr to seek and destroy racist tweets. There was a coordinated and aggressive corporate decision to apply the antifa’s “No Platform” policy to every single platform of mine that they could find.

I’m on Gab. Occidental Dissent is on Gab. You should be, too. After Trump won, the globalist cocktail clique went into a blind panic to ensure that any and all of the White Populism which they blame for Trump’s victory be purged from the web and chased away from conventional financial tools. And now they’ve found themselves in a pickle, since other rabid leftists want to comb our tweets to persecute us but Twitter’s nuked them all from orbit. All they’re accomplishing is boosting Gab’s prospects and explicitly politicizing what were originally sold to the public and shareholders alike as apolitical platforms which support Net Neutrality.

The painful thing about all this is that all we need to win is to cover our very basic legal expenses necessary to avoid default judgments. Our movement has always been cash-starved, but is especially cash-starved in the wake of our being systematically driven from using conventional payment processing services. We need your help here more than ever in order to ensure that we’re not completely shut down by unfair legal determinations resulting from our inability to represent ourselves.

The SPLC is betting that we won’t be able to scrape together enough money to protect our organizations from their “innovative (read: unconstitutional) legal strategy.” Please help us prove them wrong. Consider donating directly to either (or both) of two legal defense funds which are currently defending our organizations and our men behind the wire:

UniteTheRight Defense Fund

Kolenich Law Office

9435 Waterstone Blvd. #140

Cincinnati, OH 45249

League of the South Defense Fund

PO Box 760

Killen, AL 35645