Medium: US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

Caitlin Johnstone at Medium.com writes The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”

Bloomberg reports:

Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.

“Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.”

“Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg. “His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”

“If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.

Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?

Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably “Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:

This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.

It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control system. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.

Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception.

ZeroHedge: Twitter, Facebook Regularly Coordinated With Biden Admin To Censor Users

Here’s another shot in the argument about whether censorship by private companies is or should be illegal/unConstitutional. It’s well accepted that the First Amendment right to free speech only applies against the government. But when the government is directing or influencing the decisions of the private company…then what? Here’s ZeroHedge, talking about how Twitter, Facebook Regularly Coordinated With Biden Admin To Censor Users.

Newly released internal emails from Facebook and Twitter show an extensive effort to coordinate with the Biden administration to censor users, according to a Thursday release of information by GOP Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana.

Throughout the emails, officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services (HHS) emailed Facebook and Twitter employees with instructions on flagging instances of alleged misinformation, and guided them with talking points to counter allegedly false narratives on the platforms. 

In one instance, a CDC official asked Facebook for monthly meetings to plan “debunking” strategies, while in another case a White House official requested the removal of an Anthony Fauci parody account.

“We have already received a number of documents that clearly prove that the federal government has an incestuous relationship with social media companies and clearly coordinate to censor freedom of speech, but we’re not done,” said Schmitt in a joint statement. ” The Department of Justice is cowering behind executive privilege and has refused to turn over communications between the highest-ranking Biden Administration officials and social media companies. That’s why, yesterday, we asked the Court to compel the Department of Justice to produce those records. We’re just getting started – stay tuned.”

More via AG Schmitt’s Thursday release:

The communications already provided by the Department of Justice to the plaintiff states show, as the joint statement points out, a vast “Censorship Enterprise” across a multitude of federal agencies. In response to Missouri and Louisiana’s interrogatories, defendants identified 45 federal officials at DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General (all of which are contained in either DHS or HHS) that communicate with social media platforms about “misinformation” and censorship. The joint statement points out, “But in those responses, Defendants did not provide information about any federal officials at other federal agencies of whom they are aware who engage in such communications with social-media platforms about misinformation and censorship, though Plaintiffs had specifically asked for this highly relevant information. Defendants’ document production, however, reveals that such officials at other federal agencies exist—for example, their emails include extensive copying of officials at the Census Bureau, and they also include communications involving the Departments of Treasury and State.”

Beyond the Department of Justice’s production, “Meta, for example, has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials—including senior officials at the FDA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the White House—have communicated with Meta about content moderation on its platforms, many of whom were not disclosed in response to Plaintiffs’ interrogatories to Defendants. YouTube disclosed eleven federal officials engaged in such communications, including officials at the Census Bureau and the White House, many of whom were also not disclosed by Defendants.”

 
The joint statement continues, “The discovery provided so far demonstrates that this Censorship Enterprise is extremely broad, including officials in the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General; and evidently other agencies as well, such as the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. And it rises to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, including numerous White House officials. Defendants have objected to producing some of the most relevant and probative information in their possession.”

This “Censorship Enterprise” is proven by the Department of Justice’s productions thus far, but the full extent of federal officials’ collusion with social media companies on censorship is unknown until the Department of Justice produces further communications requested by Missouri and Louisiana.

A senior Facebook official sent an email to the Surgeon General stating, “I know our teams met today to better understand the scope of what the White House expects from us on misinformation going forward.” This email chain follows the SG’s “misinformation health advisory” in July 2021: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/free-speech-pitch-thread-docs/hhs-fb-email-1.pdf?sfvrsn=53bc4454_2

The same senior official sent a later email to HHS and noted, “Thanks again for taking the time to meet earlier today.” Then, the official continued to discuss how Facebook is taking even more steps to censor freedom of speech: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/free-speech-pitch-thread-docs/hhs-fb-exhibit.pdf?sfvrsn=55bd83df_2

Twitter scheduled a meeting to debrief top White House officials on “vaccine misinformation.”: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/free-speech-pitch-thread-docs/twitter-vaccine-meeting-wh.pdf?sfvrsn=6599e359_2b 

 
There are several instances where Facebook wouldn’t proceed with censoring freedom of speech on their platform until they had input, or a “debunking” from the CDC. Twitter followed the same course in at least one email.

The CDC also proposed a monthly pre-debunking meeting with Facebook to help them censor free speech (https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/free-speech-pitch-thread-docs/cdc-fb-monthly-debunk.pdf?sfvrsn=3508a21f_2) as well as regular “Be on the Lookout” calls with major social media outlets: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/free-speech-pitch-thread-docs/cdc-bolo-meeting.pdf?sfvrsn=9a060658_2

A White House official was even concerned about parody Fauci accounts and coordinated with FB to take them down: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/free-speech-pitch-thread-docs/fake-fauci.pdf?sfvrsn=a9d8f2bf_2

AIER: Explaining Free Speech to the Twitterati

In Explaining Free Speech to the Twitterati, Max Borders at the American Institute for Economic Research writes about free speech and free speech on private property. If someone holds up their private property as a public forum, should they be held to respect free speech, including free speech that the owner doesn’t like? Additionally, just because the US Constitution is a limitation on government, does that mean that the concept of free speech holds no moral suasion against private individuals?

Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. … Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves.

– Thomas Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia

If ever you were wondering about free speech, you could turn to Twitter. The Twitterati will tell you everything you need to know about free speech and what it means in 280 characters or less. 

First, they will tell you that free speech has nothing to do with anything that happens on Twitter because Twitter is a private company. 

Private companies may control speech as they wish “ya dopes” because the Constitution only protects citizens from censorship by the U.S. government. 

Got that? 

Free speech has been reduced to 45 words. And if you are not a U.S. citizen, those words don’t apply.

Then, they will tell you that critics of private companies like Twitter are, therefore, not only out of bounds but that free speech concerns are an affront to freedom of association (and therefore also disassociation). 


From this, you might think that apologists for digital lynch mobs and private censorship have been worshipping at the altar of libertarian brutalism. Though technically accurate in Abstractionland, narrow construals of free speech overlook more than a few essential points. 

Free Speech: Letter and Spirit

In the United States, it is true that the First Amendment only protects people from government censorship. It is also true that private property rights trump free speech. Property owners generally make the rules about speech on their property, and those rules can be illiberal, arbitrary, and grossly unfair as long as the government is not involved in setting those policies. (The latter point is an important qualifier to which we’ll return).

But the thing about free speech is it has a letter and a spirit, which the Founders understood

So, apparently, does Elon Musk.

The letter is the law, but the spirit transcends the law among conscientious people. And Musk is one of them. He just bought the largest stake in Twitter, which will surely test the Twitterati.

But according to liberals such as John Stuart Mill, we ought to practice speech toleration even in private settings. The ought here is moral, not legal. If one objects to censorship or suppression on private platforms, she appeals to the spirit of free speech, which differs from the First Amendment. One can and should apply moral suasion beyond a strict legal doctrine. We do it all the time. Sure, some people get confused about the difference, but some free speech “scolds” are simply appealing to an established liberal doctrine, which we call toleration.

By analogy, let’s imagine that the same brutalist libertarian criteria applied to people living in the Jim Crow South. Regarding the law, one can agree that property rights and freedom of association should always trump free speech in private settings. So when a racist denies entry to a person of another race, solely because of his race, one might argue that is wrong. To forbid an innocent human being from sitting at a lunch counter or attending a university, even if the owner’s decision comports with a principle of property rights and freedom of association, would still be wrong. That’s because discrimination based solely on race is wrong under most liberal ethics. So if Adam Bates (referenced above) is determined to protect “freedom of association,” but refers to anyone who evokes the spirit of free speech as “scolds,” he must also be prepared by his own narrow rationale, to defend the racist owner of the lunch counter in our example. 

Good luck with that.

By Twitterati logic, anything goes as long as it’s legal, and if it’s legal, you should just shut the eff up. But that sort of thinking excludes too many extra-political and extra-legal standards and practices that give rise to peace and progress. 

The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf tries mightily to find the spirit of free speech among the free-speech reductionists.

Friedersdorf got a number of dismissive responses including this, from someone I generally respect and consider a liberal:

Therefore, the idea that “consequence cultures” has, and ought to have, no limiting principle at all, nothing that checks it, questions it, or stands in its way–according to reductionists. Not even the greatest Enlightenment liberals offer anything of substance to the conversation because they appeal to points on spectra that don’t exist.

What a godawful failure of imagination. 

The “consequences” of consequence culture can therefore be completely arbitrary – the contrivances of a mob or any illiberal march through the institutions – as long as they do their job. That job is to contrive “consequences” that push people into submission, subjection, or silence.

Too many people are “basically okay with that,” which is one reason discourse has turned to shit, not to mention much of social media. I suspect those who tolerate such intolerance enjoy watching Twitterati team sports more than they seek understanding or strive to uphold any principles essential to community life outside The Church of State.

Those who think they have some sort of gotcha when it comes to this two-step about “private companies” might be Brutalist Libertarians, Regime Leftists, or something in between — but they don’t seem to be liberals. To be a liberal, after all, is to think that the best antidote to bad opinion or “misinformation” is higher-quality speech and evidence that tracks truth and respects discourse norms. Liberals seek to protect speech in both spirit and letter to a greater extent, even if such protections can never yield perfect outcomes. The discursive process generally creates better outcomes over time. 

In the domain of morality – which is distinct from politics or law – people have to practice it together for community to form and strengthen. Toleration is a moral practice. It’s no wonder that beltway types never seem to appreciate that. Washington is a cesspit where good opinion is about whom you know and what you’re trying to get out of them. Twitter is just Washington’s domination discourse extended to the centralized internet. In other words, it’s politics all the way down. The moral fibers that help weave people together in community and collective intelligence might as well be dental floss among the purveyors of politics, policy and punditry.

But human progress depends on a dance of cooperation and competition rooted in discourse norms designed for people to track truth. As we have indicated, one such discourse norm is the practice of speech toleration. As Mill writes in On Liberty,

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Now, I have a Jewish daughter. My appreciation of Mill doesn’t mean I’ll invite neo-Nazis into my home to say hurtful things to her, you know, out of some disproportionate sense of liberal toleration. 

I’m simply arguing we can all do better, even if there are no bright lines or points on a spectrum. For example, it is possible to have moderated platforms with far more liberal speech policies. The owners of said platforms ought to liberalize those policies, notwithstanding real threats from authorities. Likewise, individuals needn’t be so quick to press the block button when someone disagrees with them. Instead, they can try harder to use it with patience and discernment in a framework of liberal toleration. Why? At the very least, contact with diverse ideas, viewpoints, and opinions help one test and strengthen one’s position. 

Illiberalism Goes Viral

Mill’s insights have perhaps no more important application than in our effort to understand an evolving virus during a dangerous pandemic. School marms, censors, and public health authoritarians have too frequently sought to silence dissenting voices, mock alternatives, and belittle justifiable questions about any number of illiberal public health measures. And, ironically, they have also been the greatest purveyors of misinformation…(continues)

The American Mind: Terms of Servitude

The editors of The American Mind write about the chilling of online political speech in Terms of Servitude.

After January’s explosive drama, the battle for digital control of American life is now proceeding quietly, by soft degrees. The shock of 1/6 has morphed into a pretext for something still more consequential: a new phase of national crisis wherein corporations with strategic control over Americans’ communications enforce a creeping line of censorship against critics of the sitting regime. While online platforms claim only to be applying their terms of service in neutral fashion, those terms themselves stink of delegitimization. Once this shadow falls upon you and your account, you are as good as deactivated. You know this; you know they know this; they know you know they know it. Forced de facto to impose a precautionary principle on yourself, you “voluntarily” recoil well from the fuzzy line of unofficial censorship that advances far beyond the bright official line.

Already in March of 2020, Google had erased heterodox research on COVID-19. But things escalated rapidly when election season came in earnest. The New York Post was locked out of Twitter for breaking a story about Hunter Biden’s Chinese business ventures. The sitting president had his social media accounts shut down entirely. Twitter competitor Parler was removed from Amazon’s servers for hosting discussions among Trumpists about the unfolding events. And YouTube banned even the allegation of widespread election fraud. Americans realized—or should have—that they had suddenly been herded into a communications control system unlike any ever imposed—or even conceived—in America.

Not merely a handful of fringe cranks, but a full half of the country, is being pre-screened out of the kinds of political discourse fundamental to American citizenship. Yet this radical change is setting in with unnerving ease and rapidity. Day by day, Americans are losing faith that there is anything they can do about it. Day by day, they are getting used to it. Ryan T. Anderson’s fair and sensible interrogation of transgenderism was stripped off of Amazon; Shelby Steele had to fight tooth and nail before his documentary on race relations would stream on Prime, which also axed Michael Pack’s Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words (which even PBS was open-minded enough to air) during black history month. Though all these turns of events got some press in the predictable places, each new act of censorship goes down a little easier with the general public. This “reset”—this revolution—is just the way things are now.

This week, The American Mind experienced the new “normal” firsthand. A recent piece of content entitled “The Ruling Class Strikes Back” was removed from YouTube “due to a violation” of what YouTube calls its Community Guidelines, specifically the prohibition regarding “spam, deceptive practices, and scams.” Our colleagues pressed YouTube’s support team on the claims and discovered that the video was flagged for “advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election.”

This action is much more than the online equivalent of a moving violation. It is a permanent warning, which flags not just one’s challenged content but one’s entire account. In this way, any finding of another infraction between now and eternity results in a suspension and, in effect, a blacklisting. Officially, it’s three strikes you’re out. Unofficially, and no doubt deliberately, after just one transgression against the political speech code, the only reasonable reaction is to bend over backwards to silence yourself—not just on the original matter, but on any matter that might cause the Eye of Sauron to swivel your way again.

In our case, we suspect the offending verbiage concerns the election-season wave of court suits and legislation deployed to strengthen the prospects of the Left: “Its lawfare had the effect of making vote fraud on a mass scale far easier, and harder to trace, than ever before. If nothing else, this had the effect of irrevocably undermining American confidence in our elections.” In other words, it is “deceptive practice” to suggest that the 2020 election was anything other than perfectly regular and beyond reproach in every regard. Though the podcast is still accessible on our Apple Podcasts feed, the black mark will remain on our record with YouTube—making us vulnerable to a complete account wipe down the line should we “misstep” again.

None of this is illegal. We recognize that. We understand the argument, repeated somewhat tiresomely, that private companies are free to host speech or not, and to do business or not, as they wish. But Twitter, YouTube, Google, and Facebook are more than private companies. They are now powerful quasi-government entities, with no precedent or constitutionally established role in our government, which, by their own admission, have a profound national effect on American politics. (That’s how Twitter justifies the need for its “Civic Integrity policy” in the first place.) Clinton voter Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, found in 2018 that “no company in the history of the world has had the ability to shift votes and opinions to the extent and on the scale that Google has.” These companies are not just doing business: they are reshaping our regime. At the very least, we should have a say in how this goes down. But on just this question of the ruling class transforming our form of government against our will and without our participation, the noose of suppression tightens, and Americans slip into silence.

As a governing logic for our national culture, as a regular dynamic of public life, this creeping censorship is inescapably un-American. Our colleague Michael Anton pointed out to Tucker Carlson that the way to settle concerns about election integrity in a free society is not to punish them but to answer them, with open discussion in the public square. Instead, even a conscientious objection to proclaiming affirmatively what the ruling class demands is being denied.

And what is good for the goose of the 2020 election is good for the gander of whatever the regime chooses to officialize, from the politics of transgender activism to those surrounding coronavirus lockdowns. To make the broadcast of one set of views all but mandatory, and to keep those who disagree from organizing, having their say, and engaging on their merits, is flatly inconsistent with our most fundamental habits and mores, our way of life, and, ultimately, our form of government.

We will continue sharing our frank assessments of this and subsidiary issues at the heart of the political crisis forced on our country by its current revolutionary regime. We will not stick to the pre-approved script of a powerful minority or sing from the hymnal of policed opinion. For Americans’ concerns to be answered honestly and resolved legitimately, we must protect their digital communications from the command and control of ruling-class authoritarians. Technologized censorship cannot coexist with the American way of life. It is an irrepressible conflict. And we know which one has to go.

Glenn Greenwald: Congress Demands More Internet Censorship

Journalist Glenn Greenwald writes Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Mar. 25, 2021

Over the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

As I noted when I reported last month on the scheduling of this hearing, this was “the third time in less than five months that the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms.” The bulk of Thursday’s lengthy hearing consisted of one Democratic member after the next complaining that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have failed in their duties to censor political voices and ideological content that these elected officials regard as adversarial or harmful, accompanied by threats that legislative punishment (including possible revocation of Section 230 immunity) is imminent in order to force compliance (Section 230 is the provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that shields internet companies from liability for content posted by their users).

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”

Zuckerberg in particular has minimal capacity to communicate the way human beings naturally do. The Facebook CEO was obviously instructed by a team of public speaking consultants that it is customary to address members of the Committee as “Congressman” or “Congresswoman.” He thus began literally every answer he gave — even in rapid back and forth questions — with that word. He just refused to move his mouth without doing that — for five hours (though, in fairness, the questioning of Zuckerberg was often absurd and unreasonable). His brain permits no discretion to deviate from his script no matter how appropriate. For every question directed to him, he paused for several seconds, had his internal algorithms search for the relevant place in the metaphorical cassette inserted in a hidden box in his back, uttered the word “Congressman” or “Congresswoman,” stopped for several more seconds to search for the next applicable spot in the spine-cassette, and then proceeded unblinkingly to recite the words slowly transmitted into his neurons. One could practically see the gears in his head painfully churning as the cassette rewound or fast-forwarded. This tortuous ritual likely consumed roughly thirty percent of the hearing time. I’ve never seen members of Congress from across the ideological spectrum so united as they were by visceral contempt for Zuckerberg’s non-human comportment:https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vsA4u7i20_0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

But it is vital not to lose sight of how truly despotic hearings like this are. It is easy to overlook because we have become so accustomed to political leaders successfully demanding that social media companies censor the internet in accordance with their whims. Recall that Parler, at the time it was the most-downloaded app in the country, was removed in January from the Apple and Google Play Stores and then denied internet service by Amazon, only after two very prominent Democratic House members publicly demanded this. At the last pro-censorship hearing convened by Congress, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) explicitly declared that the Democrats’ grievance is not that these companies are censoring too much but rather not enough. One Democrat after the next at Thursday’s hearing described all the content on the internet they want gone: or else. Many of them said this explicitly.

At one point toward the end of the hearing, Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), in the context of the January 6 riot, actually suggested that the government should create a list of groups they unilaterally deem to be “domestic terror organizations” and then provide it to tech companies as guidance for what discussions they should “track and remove”: in other words, treat these groups the same was as ISIS and Al Qaeda. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/owN9C1PZgG8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0

Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey. As I detailed last month, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the state violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee when they coerce private actors to censor for them — exactly the tyrannical goal to which these hearings are singularly devoted.

There are genuine problems posed by Silicon Valley monopoly power. Monopolies are a threat to both political freedom and competition, which is why economists of most ideological persuasions have long urged the need to prevent them. There is some encouraging legislation pending in Congress with bipartisan support (including in the House Antitrust Subcommittee before which I testified several weeks ago) that would make meaningful and productive strides toward diluting the unaccountable and undemocratic power these monopolies wield over our political and cultural lives. If these hearings were about substantively considering those antitrust measures, they would be meritorious.

But that is hard and difficult work and that is not what these hearings are about. They want the worst of all worlds: to maintain Silicon Valley monopoly power but transfer the immense, menacing power to police our discourse from those companies into the hands of the Democratic-controlled Congress and Executive Branch.

And as I have repeatedly documented, it is not just Democratic politicians agitating for greater political censorship but also their liberal journalistic allies, who cannot tolerate that there may be any places on the internet that they cannot control. That is the petty wannabe-despot mentality that has driven them to police the “unfettered” discussions on the relatively new conversation app Clubhouse, and escalate their attempts to have writers they dislike removed from Substack. Just today, The New York Times warns, on its front page, that there are “unfiltered” discussions taking place on Google-enabled podcasts:

New York Times front page, Mar. 26, 2021

We are taught from childhood that a defining hallmark of repressive regimes is that political officials wield power to silence ideas and people they dislike, and that, conversely, what makes the U.S. a “free” society is the guarantee that American leaders are barred from doing so. It is impossible to reconcile that claim with what happened in that House hearing room over the course of five hours on Thursday.

Colion Noir: Proof Facebook Fact-Checkers Are Censoring Debates On Constitutional Rights Like the 2nd Amendment

From Colion Noir:

I made a video in response to US Representative Mike Thompson, who tweeted, HR8 “A Universal Background Check Bill”, Has bi-Partisan Support from 90 percent of the American People. In my video, I stated that this is not true, because the polls where Mike Thompson got this 90% number from were misleading because they didn’t ask about Universal Background Checks which are different from the Regular background checks that we already have.

I further Stated that if the people who were polled understood the distinction between a background check and a “UNIVERSAL” background check and that a Universal Background check can’t be enforced effectively without a national gun registry I highly doubt 90% of Americans would agree with a UNIVERSAL Background Check.

Four Days after I released my video, I got an email from a guy named Tom Kertscher with PolitiFact asking me to submit proof by noon CT today.

A few hours later, PolitiFact Released an article from Tom concluding my video was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its news feed & my video was false.

Tom is anything but objective on this issue. All you have to do is search Guns on his Twitter feed and the vast majority of his gun tweets are anti-gun tweets from politicians and the PolitiFact articles that he’s written to try to disprove pro-gun arguments.

Toms’s entire argument for why my video was false, is based on polls about background checks. Here’s the problem, none of the polls used the phrase UNIVERSAL Background Checks in their question. Tom used it in his title when he concluded: Support for UNIVERSAL Background checks on gun buyers is near 90%, but none of the polls actually used the phrase UNIVERSAL background check or explained the difference from the Background Checks we already have.

The reason why this is important is that Universal Background checks do not only apply to gun sales they apply to all transfers.

It’s even harder to believe this 90% Number when this percentage doesn’t show itself when universal background checks are voted on the state level.

Washington State has universal background checks but it only got 59% of the popular vote in Washington and that’s a state that hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1994 or a republican Governor since 1980.

In Nevada, it only got 50.5% of the popular vote and in Maine, Lost with only 48% support.

If you combine the number of people who actually voted on universal background checks in all three of those states, it’s close to 3.97 million people, and each of these states leans blue, and out of the 3.97 million voters in those three states, only 54.7% voted in favor of Universal Background Checks.

Facebook is supposed to be a platform for open discussion. Instead, it’s turning into a platform where random fact-checkers get to play GOD.

How are we supposed to have an open dialogue and exchange of ideas and opinions when the platforms where the vast majority of these conversations are happening, use a clearly biased “Independent fact-checker” to justify invalidating my video and as a result limiting its reach.

I’m just trying to inform people about one of the most important if not the most important right we have in this country.

I get that Facebook is a private platform and they can do whatever they want and use whatever guy named after a pair of shoes they want to determine what can be posted on your platform but have an ounce of intellectual honesty and let us have the conversation without artificially limiting our voices.

That doesn’t help the country nor does it help the platform. We become stronger as a country by sharpening our ideas against the blade of open discourse. All these so-called fact-checkers are nothing more than political and intellectual bullies, not because they critiqued my video but because there’s no one to check the fact-checkers.

They have the final say and their say dictates how many people get to hear and see my ideas and that indirectly makes them Gods of online political and intellectual discourse and it’s insanely dangerous.

Scragged: Samizdat Strategies

Samizdat copies

Scragged has a series of three articles on Samizdat Strategies or how to survive in a trending police state. Samizdat is a Russian term which referred to self-published articles designed to spread truth under an oppressive communist regime. With Big Tech’s censorship of voices which dissent from the government approved narratives, people in the US may very well need to receive truth from sources other than the mainstream.

The US has a rich history of creation; we pioneered concepts such as innocent until proven guilty, structured as a democratic republic run for the people.  We’ve crated many tangible things such as cars, computers, the internet, etc.  Our use of fossil fuels has freed most of us from slavery to back-braking toil needed to scratch enough food out of the ground to survive. These benefits have been the result of the creativity enabled by the freedom of thought and expression of ideas given to us by our government.

Today, our reality has changed, and not for the better.

All America is in the process of learning many harsh lessons that our forefathers fought and died to avoid us having to repeat.  Perhaps the most severe lesson is this: Given that we have proved ourselves incapable of keeping a functional representative republic, as Ben Franklin feared, it’s now time to take serious, inconvenient action to conceal any of your activities that the cancel mob might consider to be at all controversial either now or in the unforeseeable future.

Government is like fire – a necessary but untrustworthy servant and a fearsome master.  People who seek power over others will do pretty much whatever increases their power.  That’s why it’s said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty – a price we have signally failed to pay in convenient monthly installments for lo these many years, and now the accumulated bill has come due with interest.

As soon as someone’s elected to office, he or she figures out that there’s only so much power to go around.  Any power citizens have over their own lives means that elected officials have less power.  Thus, regardless of party, elected officials have a powerful incentive to take power from us and give it to themselves and to their friends.

That’s what politics is all about – gaining and using power.  If  freedom-loving people take their eyes off the ball for even a moment, we end up with tyranny.  Joe Biden is the President because his side understands the effective usage of power: his side controlled the counting of votes, controlled the adjudication of challenges of both the count and the votes, controls the reporting of all of the above, and today, bids fair to control your and my ability even to talk about anything they don’t want discussed.

That is power, pure and simple – truth, justice, and the American way factor in not at all, but that doesn’t make the power any less real or effective in causing grief to dissenters.

Tyranny is always based on fraud, fear, and force.  Since no regime can directly control all of the people all of the time, the majority are kept in line by lying to them or keeping them too fearful to resist.  Force is used against those who refuse to believe what they’re told to believe and become vocal about it; as long as their number is in a small enough minority, they present no threat to those in power.

Truth Finds a Way

During the era of Stalinist tyranny in the Soviet Union, people who saw through the communist fable engaged in a practice known as “samidzat“, a Russian word meaning “self-publishing” to spread whatever truth they could.

When the entire MSM and the Tech Lords colluded to make it impossible for the New York Post, the 4th largest newspaper in America, to spread its story about the Biden crime family’s lucrative connections to Ukraine and China, we realized that we had arrived at the “total fraud” stage of our slide into tyranny.  During the pre-Internet samizdat days, the Russian government tried to register all typewriters to prevent people from spreading the word.  People caught with unregistered typewriters they’d smuggled in from abroad or using registered typewriters in forbidden ways faced jail or worse – sometimes a lot worse.

Similarly, even mentioning the well-attested 2020 vote fraud or claiming that the Capitol riot was organized by Democrats to make Trump supporters look bad will get you canceled from social media and in some cases fired from your job, unless, of course, you’re a Democrat luminary.  AOC, for example, blames Facebook for the Capitol riot because, she says, it let the rioters organize.

Doesn’t she realize that if it was organized, as we all believe it to have been, it couldn’t have been caused by Mr. Trump’s speech, given that the riot had already started before he’d even gotten well underway?  We don’t know what she knows or believes – but we do know that she won’t be criticized for exonerating Mr. Trump of the Democrats’ latest bogus charge against him because Democrats are above criticism.

You can’t possibly keep up with what woketivists can say, must say, and what they can’t say unless you spend hours per day on Twitter.  We don’t have time for that, so it’s time to figure out how to communicate securely and how to minimize the visibility of your now-unacceptable ideas, while still making them visible to those who might still have ears to hear them.

It’s Mushrooming

Once our Tech Lords revealed their true colors by canceling President Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, stopping his campaign from sending email, and lowering his Google page ratings, others are piling on.  Harvard students are circulating a petition to revoke the degrees granted to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, Sen. Ted Cruz, and Rep. Dan Crenshaw.  The petition describes these three as “violent actors” who need to be held accountable for their actions.

Not to be outdone, Yale law school students and alumni are demanding that Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) be disbarred over what it says were their “efforts to undermine the peaceful transition of power after a free and fair election.”

Hawley and Cruz led efforts in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday to stop the counting of electoral votes certifying the victory of Democrat Joe Biden over President Trump in the November election.

If nothing else, these Ivy-league students reveal what liberals mean by “free and fair election” – it means their candidate won, no more and no less.  This isn’t surprising: they’ve been saying for years that “free and fair elections” can only result in elected Democrats.

Twitter has “not yet begun” to censor, per its CEO.  Project Veritas has published information about Twitter founder Dorsey saying, “This is going to be much bigger than just one account”:

“We know we are focused on one account right now,” Dorsey said, in reference to his company’s decision to ban President Trump. “But this is going to be much bigger than just one account and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, and this week, and the next few weeks and go beyond the inauguration. We have to expect that, and we have to be ready for that.”

The New York Post wrote a long article describing the many, many ways Democrats plan to deplatform, demonize, demonetize, and destroy anyone who ever supported Mr. Trump.  One wonders how long their printing press will survive.

That is not an idle concern.  Amazon is the largest bookseller in the world and has used its market power to ban books which contradict the current woketivist dogma.  Searching for “amazon book ban” on duckduckgo.com will get you quite a list – on Google, though, not so much.

The Washington Post told us how Amazon had reversed a ban on an e-book “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates,” which argued that the mainstream media overstates the threat from the virus.  An hour after Mr. Biden was inaugurated, the WHO announced that they’re changing the sensitivity of the covid test “which will result in large reductions in the numbers of positive cases.”  This confirms our belief that the covid threat was overstated from the beginning, just as we and many others had said.

Why did Amazon ban a book which seems to have told the truth?  Is Amazon on the side of truth and debate?

Amazon also banned a book discussing the health hazards which are inherent in the gay lifestyle, and a book arguing that it’s not a good idea to let a 12-year-old girl decide that her desire to be a boy is so strong that her breasts should be surgically removed.  Trying to talk her out of this irreversible surgery is called “conversion therapy,” which has been banned in some US jurisdictions.

In addition to selling books, Amazon also offers Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the largest cloud facilities on the planet.  When Google and Apple pulled the Parler smartphone from their app stores and made it disappear from many if not most subscribers’ phones, AWS ended their hosting agreement and threw Parler off their platform on the grounds that Parler had refused to delete some posts which AWS regarded as unacceptable.

The concept of a business which rents server capacity having the right to tell customers what they may and may not store on their servers is as new as Twitter and Facebook banning the President of the United States from communicating.  AWS also provides servers to Twitter, which saw Parler as a potential competitor, particularly if all of Mr. Trump’s supporters abandoned Twitter for Parler.  We’re looking forward to hearing what comes out of discovery as Parler sues AWS, though it isn’t going well so far.

The fact that Mr. Bezos is stepping down as head of Amazon to pursue other interests has been in the news lately.  We know pretty much what to expect from his successor, Andy Jazzy, who was the driving force behind the growth of AWS which provides nearly half of Amazon’s operating profit – he accused the Louisville police of murdering Brianna Taylor and he’s the executive who made the decision to dump Parler.  How can any small business stay on AWS, knowing that they may be thrown off the platform at any moment for political reasons?

On the grounds that it’s silly to send money to your enemies, some people we know have stopped buying from Amazon.  That’s a major pain because no other service provides nearly as convenient a mechanism for finding products.  Others have suggested to carefully order only one thing at a time to at least maximize their shipping expenses – but we’ve found that Amazon’s computers are usually smart enough to pick up on this and combine them anyway.

Even if you don’t oppose Amazon because of its political stance, life won’t be pleasant if they put most other retailers out of business and create an effective monopoly.  There’s no reason to cancel your Prime subscription because that will be noticed, but you could stop buying and let Prime expire.

Blocking Advertisements

Google recently blocked ads from an organization opposed to packing the supreme court and took down videos taken in the US Senate(!) of doctors testifying about their experience treating covid.  Banning such forms of free speech is the thin edge of the wedge.

Educrats who are wedded to the idea that kids should always be promoted to the next grade regardless of whether they’ve mastered the material, because being held back damages their self-esteem, have believed for decades that the Christian practice of teaching kids they’re sinners in need of salvation harms their self-esteem and should be banned.

Back before the 2016 election, we quoted the Washington Post which quoted Hillary Clinton as saying that longstanding religious practices would have to “be changed.”  The context of her statement makes it plan that she advocated use of force to bring about such changes.

That notion has led to our “cancel culture” which seeks to ruin anyone who isn’t sufficiently woke, and has led to murder in several cases.

Lest you take comfort in the prominence and visibility of the victims of these wrongful attacks, be assured that cancellation is not limited to prominent persons.  Innocent nonentities such as retired Chicago firefighter David Quintavalle have been falsely accused of participating in storming the US Capitol, and all but driven from his home by ignorance-based abuse.

Mr. Quintavalle presented receipts as proof that he was in Chicago at the time, but false accusations are still all over Twitter and he has received death threats.  TV crews staked out his house and police dispatched a patrol car to keep watch.

Our Department of Injustice

Cancel culture started in the federal government.  You’ve read about their attack on Gen. Flynn.  This was one of many violations of law by the Obama administration.  Now that we know how they shafted him, we know that the FBI is not the good guys.

On the bright side, at least we know how they operate.  Deep State perjury traps depend on most citizens thinking the FBI is seeking truth.  Now that you know that government employees don’t care about truth at all, there’s no excuse for letting them trap you.

It’s simple.  Suppose you tell the feds you had lunch with 2 “friends” on Wednesday.  They lean on your “friends” to get them to say it was Thursday.  Unless you can prove it was Wednesday, they can charge you with lying to them, which is a crime even if you weren’t under oath, and bankrupt you by forcing you to pay for lawyers.

Having a lawyer won’t help you – Gen. Flynn’s first law firm betrayed him to the feds.

Why would they so blatantly violate the fundamentals of legal ethics?  Lawyers have to be members of the bar to practice. Liberals are already calling for the lawyers who defended Mr. Trump to be disbarred. When push comes to shove, will “your” lawyer defend you or defend his career?

King George Rides Again” shows how our bureaucrats are creating a great many “crimes” that can send you to jail.  Prosecutors get rated on the amount of jail time they inflict which is easy to measure.  It gives examples and tells you part of how to protect yourself.

Injustice” tells the story of an innocent man who spent $2 million on lawyers and finally copped a plea for 6 months in club fed as opposed to 150 years if he’d gone to trial.  It gives more detail how they work you over and tells what you need to get from them before telling them anything at all, not even your name.  You can justify that – during WW II, Japanese-Americans were locked up because of their names.  Japanese girls who had married Americans were left alone because they no longer had Japanese names.

There’s no doubt that we are in a position that has been unfamiliar to Americans for centuries: one where, like residents of any totalitarian land, we must watch what we say – or else!  The American mindset is not oriented toward operating in this kind of environment, but necessity breeds invention, which we’ll explore in upcoming articles in this series.

Given that liberals won’t like what we’re telling you and Internet service providers have shown their willingness to take down sites they do not like, ours may disappear.  You’d be best off pasting this article and the rest of this series into a Word doc, or even printing it out, for later reference and samizdat-style sharing.

But, maybe we aren’t to that point yet.  There is much further to fall, as we’ll see in the next article in this series.

See also Part II and Part III.

Rutherford Institute: The Slippery Slope from Censoring ‘Disinformation’ to Silencing Truth

Constitutional law attorney John Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute writes Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring ‘Disinformation’ to Silencing Truth.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.

Then the internet censors got involved and went after extremists spouting “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden, and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shunned for appearing to disagree with the majority.

By the time the techno-censors went after extremists spouting “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists. Still, few spoke out.

Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices such as Donald TrumpAlex JonesDavid Icke and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

The question is not whether the content of their speech was legitimate.

The concern is what happens after such prominent targets are muzzled. What happens once the corporate techno-censors turn their sights on the rest of us?

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We are on a fast-moving trajectory.

Already, there are calls for the Biden administration to appoint a “reality czar” in order to tackle disinformation, domestic extremism and the nation’s so-called “reality crisis.”

Knowing what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like Trump or any of the others who are being muzzled, nor do you have to agree or even sympathize with their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship would be dangerously naïve.

As Matt Welch, writing for Reason, rightly points out, “Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation.

In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Welcome to the age of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best. Certainly, Facebook and Twitter have become the modern-day equivalents of public squares, traditional free speech forums, with the internet itself serving as a public utility.

But what does that mean for free speech online: should it be protected or regulated?

When given a choice, the government always goes for the option that expands its powers at the expense of the citizenry’s. Moreover, when it comes to free speech activities, regulation is just another word for censorship.

Right now, it’s trendy and politically expedient to denounce, silence, shout down and shame anyone whose views challenge the prevailing norms, so the tech giants are lining up to appease their shareholders.

This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority—exactly the menace to free speech that James Madison sought to prevent when he drafted the First Amendment to the Constitution—marching in lockstep with technofascism.

With intolerance as the new scarlet letter of our day, we now find ourselves ruled by the mob.

Those who dare to voice an opinion or use a taboo word or image that runs counter to the accepted norms are first in line to be shamed, shouted down, silenced, censored, fired, cast out and generally relegated to the dust heap of ignorant, mean-spirited bullies who are guilty of various “word crimes” and banished from society.

For example, a professor at Duquesne University was fired for using the N-word in an academic context. To get his job back, Gary Shank will have to go through diversity training and restructure his lesson plans.

This is what passes for academic freedom in America today.

If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.

We are almost at that point now.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

Again, to quote Greenwald:

Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation. The promise of the internet from the start was that it would be a tool of liberation, of egalitarianism, by permitting those without money and power to compete on fair terms in the information war with the most powerful governments and corporations. But just as is true of allowing the internet to be converted into a tool of coercion and mass surveillance, nothing guts that promise, that potential, like empowering corporate overlords and unaccountable monopolists to regulate and suppress what can be heard.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Therefore, it is important to recognize the thought prison that is being built around us for what it is: a prison with only one route of escape—free thinking and free speaking in the face of tyranny.

The Trumpet: How the 2020 Election Was Saved

Stephen Flurry at The Trumpet tells us How the 2020 Election Was Saved by entrenched interests.

Last week Time magazine published a 6,500-word article admitting the existence of “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information”—all for the purpose of protecting the 2020 election.

And, Time tells you, this was all a good thing.

This is the propaganda media in action. It is a vivid sign of just how wrong the world we live in has become.

Time admitted that it was revealing the “secret history” of a “cabal,” wielding enormous power over a “vast, cross-partisan campaign” and “hundreds of millions of dollars,” committing a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes” of “unprecedented scale” that was ready, among other things, to “flood the streets.”

This is not a conspiracy theory blog or even a conservative commentator. This is liberal, mainstream Time magazine. And this is an outright admission that liberals committed a nationwide conspiracy to change the election—including changing laws and changing your perception.

This is an attempt to admit the conspiracy that you suspected (and were scoffed at for suspecting) is real—because the truth is leaking out anyway—but to make you believe this was all a good thing.

The conspirators “were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.” They were not destroying the Constitution; they were rescuing democracy! They were not destroying your rights; they were “saving” the election.

Just weeks ago they were telling us, “Conspiracy? What conspiracy?” Now they are telling us, “Oh, of course there was a conspiracy—and it was a good thing.”

Read this Time article, and you will better realize how badly America is afflicted.

Here are quotes, in context, straight from the February 4 Time magazine article by Molly Ball titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” (The context is: Believe that this was all a good thing.)

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. …

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage, and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

They were controlling information and changing rules and laws, but even though the average rational person would consider this rigging the election, you had better believe that they were “saving” and “fortifying” the election process!

Who were they? How did they control your information? How did they influence your perception? This article gives shocking detail about some of that, even admitting the threat of violence that the leftists were using to control the election—while constantly reminding you: We will let you confirm that it was a conspiracy, but you must believe it was a good conspiracy.

In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from ceos. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and afl-cio published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain—inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests—in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

If anyone thought the 2020 election was 155 million American voters choosing between the qualifications of two candidates and having their eligible votes counted and added up to determine the winner, the liberals at Time and elsewhere know differently. But remember: It’s good that liberals conducted a massive assault on voters’ perceptions (to say nothing of voters’ ballots) because, remember, Donald Trump was assaulting democracy.

This group, ranging from street rioters to billionaire executives, had an army on standby in case they needed to “save” the election by conducting a massive, violent coup!

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election—an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted.

Time magazine says that protecting the freedom, fairness, credibility and soundness of the election was the job of an “extraordinary shadow effort”—and that the people laboring in these shadows did not care who won. They had no intention to influence the outcome—only to make sure it was “fair.” Is your mind performing all the necessary contortions to believe what Time journalists and executives are telling you?

The article continues:

For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined president. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

How altruistic! These leftists and conservatives were motivated not by stopping President Trump’s reelection. They just care so much about democratic self-governance! Forget about the fact that many of them have been desecrating and destroying the memories of the Founding Fathers who established democratic self-governance. Believe instead that they spent hundreds of millions to make sure each voter could freely choose whichever candidate he or she thought was best for this country, just as the founders intended. Believe that changing the outcome of the election by manipulating millions of people was the furthest thing from their minds!

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.

After every election, the votes are counted and the winners are announced on election night. Except for 2020. This time, they planned for the count to take longer. And they colluded to implement information campaigns to influence Americans to expect the count to take longer. Some of their media assets prepared voters before the election and included social media posts telling people to “relax” because “good things take time.” Time says you must believe that this virtually unprecedented delay—a delay they were planning to have ahead of time—was “protecting the integrity” of the election.

Protecting the election would require an effort of unprecedented scale. As 2020 progressed, it stretched to Congress, Silicon Valley and the nation’s statehouses. It drew energy from the summer’s racial-justice protests, many of whose leaders were a key part of the liberal alliance. And eventually it reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy. … The first task was overhauling America’s balky election infrastructure—in the middle of a pandemic. For the thousands of local, mostly nonpartisan officials who administer elections, the most urgent need was money.

Good thing the liberal super-rich and all the organizations they fund have a lot of money!

Private philanthropy stepped into the breach. An assortment of foundations contributed tens of millions in election-administration funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative chipped in $300 million.

Time says you should view super-rich elites spending hundreds of millions to change the actual administration of the election process—and just in the swing states that would determine the outcome of the election—as philanthropists courageously “stepping into the breach.”

The article also admits that it was this same “loose” liberal cabal—which, you might suspect, is probably not all that loose—that organized and initiated the violent, destructive summer of 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and riots.

The billionaire executives of Facebook and Twitter, for example, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, both met with “civil rights” leaders who were warning them that they had better silence pro-Trump “rumors.”

Time also admits that they coordinated to create online information campaigns to convince Americans that a delay in vote counting was normal. “The Voting Rights Lab and IntoAction created state-specific memes and graphics, spread by e-mail, text, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok [which is controlled by China], urging that every vote be counted. … The organization’s tracking polls found the message was being heard: the percentage of the public that didn’t expect to know the winner on election night gradually rose until by late October, it was over 70 percent. A majority also believed that a prolonged count wasn’t a sign of problems.” Time insists it was a good thing the billionaires and radical activists succeeded in changing the beliefs of the average American—otherwise people might think there was a problem with the election.

Finally, Election Day came on Nov. 3, 2020. And there were problems with votes being cast. And there were a lot of problems and delays with counting the vote—especially, for some reason, in the swing states that would determine who won the election.

The article says that following Election Day, the conspirators “monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”

Who were some of their leaders? Norm Eisen, “a prominent lawyer and former Obama administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program” (emphasis added). Did this former Obama official also not care who won the election, but only wanted to guarantee fairness?

Another organizer was a man named Mike Podhorzer, who set up mass teleconference calls to keep everyone coordinated. “The racial-justice uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing in May was not primarily a political movement. The organizers who helped lead it wanted to harness its momentum for the election without allowing it to be co-opted by politicians. Many of those organizers were part of Podhorzer’s network, from the activists in battleground states who partnered with the Democracy Defense Coalition to organizations with leading roles in the Movement for Black Lives.”

“Democracy Defense,” “Voter Protection,” “Protect the Results,” “Civil Rights.” These sound like groups of people interested in lawful, constitutional, free and fair elections. Right?

Well, it turns out they did have a preferred candidate. And if that preferred candidate did not win on Election Day—or whenever the delayed vote-counting was finally done—they had a massive network of “protesters” ready to be unleashed at any moment.

This was a threat!

The article continues:

But behind the scenes, the business community was engaged in its own anxious discussions about how the election and its aftermath might unfold. The summer’s racial-justice protests had sent a signal to business owners too: the potential for economy-disrupting civil disorder.

This was part of the means of persuading those executives who might not have been quite ideologically liberal enough to participate in this election manipulation: use of force. This is describing a violent, government-overthrowing coup!

Meanwhile, the liberals’ “messaging”—more accurately, deception—was that the nation must live in fear of Trump voters rioting and staging a coup! But in truth, Trump voters reacted to losing a highly unusual, highly suspect election mostly by getting up and going to work the next morning.

The summer uprising had shown that people power could have a massive impact. Activists began preparing to reprise the demonstrations if Trump tried to steal the election. “Americans plan widespread protests if Trump interferes with election,” Reuters reported in October, one of many such stories. More than 150 liberal groups, from the Women’s March to the Sierra Club to Color of Change, from Democrats.com to the Democratic Socialists of America, joined the “Protect the Results” coalition. The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as November 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets.”

This may seem like a lot of different “action committees” and “research groups” and other organizations. But where do they all get their funding and their marching orders? In many cases, it traces back to the same few billionaires. Not quite as “loose” a coalition as it seems.

At 11 p.m. on election night, President Trump’s results were better than anyone expected. (Even after the delayed, largely fraudulent vote-counting, he ended up with an official total of 74 million—an all-time record second only to, somehow, Joe Biden’s 81 million.) In response, this “election integrity”-minded group signed in for an emergency teleconference call.

Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. “It was really important for me and the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was true,” says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition. Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.

While he was talking, Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: tv anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. The question then became what to do next.

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,” Peoples says.

They were perhaps minutes away from setting off mass protests and, undoubtedly, riots. But they were afraid that enough Americans might finally react against everything that had been going on, and the liberals on the conference call decided to trust their system.

So the word went out: Stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.” …

Activists reoriented the Protect the Results protests toward a weekend of celebration. “Counter their disinfo with our confidence & get ready to celebrate,” read the messaging guidance Shenker-Osorio presented to the liberal alliance on Friday, November 6. “Declare and fortify our win. Vibe: confident, forward-looking, unified—not passive, anxious.” The voters, not the candidates, would be the protagonists of the story.

The planned day of celebration happened to coincide with the election being called on November 7.

This is what the liberal activists and elites were telling their people to think and feel and express for the purpose of locking in their win. And the fact that the planned day of celebration was the same day that the mainstream media, in coordination, called the 2020 presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden was only a “coincidence.”

Remember the celebration? Did you see all the coronavirus-scare-mongering liberal politicians and their followers thronging in the streets without masks—and wonder why they weren’t celebrating in their homes, wearing two masks and sitting at least 6 feet apart?

This is the art of the steal. The swamp is deep! The “deep state” is deep! This is what Donald Trump warned about: powerful, influential elites who are “enemies of the people.” There truly is a conspiracy at work.

And you can take the liberals’ own word for it! Time executives were very deliberate about the words they used to describe this. Conspiracy, cabal, protest strategy, reprising the summer demonstrations—these are not words that accidentally slipped by editors. They want you to know there was a conspiracy—perhaps because you would find out anyway—and they want you to think it’s a good thing.

Read this Time article and come to a stark realization: The world you live in—which seems fine on the surface—is hanging by a thread. And the thread is rotten.

The only answer, the only hope, is not the Republican Party or some new party or even the ideals of conservatism. Your only hope is to see the world and even this once-great nation for what it is and to use this opportunity for what it is: one last chance to repent.

See also The Organic Prepper’s The US Ministry Of Woke Propaganda Wants To Cancel You, Me, Fox, & Anyone Else Who Disagrees

Liberty Blitzkrieg: Cancel Yourself

Michael Krieger at Liberty Blitzkrieg has taken a break from his writing break to write Cancel Yourself .

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worthwhile to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything? If the United States of America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now — recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censor­ship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that govern­ment of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world’s most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. “Free as a bird,” we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded. Something analogous is true of human beings. If the bread is supplied regularly and copiously three times a day, many of them will be perfectly content to live by bread alone — or at least by bread and circuses alone.

Take the right to vote. In principle it is a great privilege. In practice as recent history has repeatedly shown the right to vote by itself is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum break up modern society’s merely func­tional collectives into self-governing voluntarily cooperating groups capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Govern­ment.

– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958

This isn’t how I intended to return to writing. There was supposed to be a new website and a new focus, but circumstances emerged and laid waste to my plans. So here I am, back again. I’m a bit rusty so bear with me.

There’s no reason to rehash what happened over the last several days, but the gist of it is that significant components of internet infrastructure were weaponized for ideological and political purposes. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we all knew this day was coming. We just didn’t want to admit it or confront it, because it’s not a comforting or easy thing to admit or confront. But the day has arrived and we’re no longer in a position to ignore it. The most concerning aspect isn’t that it happened, but that it could happen at all. The internet is clearly broken, possibly dying, and if we want to digitally associate freely again at some point in the future, we have no choice but to fix it.

Although I have no team in the parochial political fight, I’ve chosen one in the broader ideological battle. The wielding of such concentrated and unaccountable power over human communication has crossed a very serious line and sets us up for a future world I’m uninterested in participating in. As such, we have no choice but to confront the issue head on.

People who think this is about Trump for me are the most ridiculous people. I never voted for him, supported him or took him seriously. While I recognize the role he played in the greater scheme of this massive historical cycle, the best thing that can happen is for him to disappear as a political force and be understood as the spectacle and distraction he was. I’m not here to lecture anyone about who they voted for, but I’m here to connect with people of all political persuasions ready to become serious and admit that a real strategy is needed to address the unaccountable power of the national security state oligarchy. Conventional political avenues are a dead end at this point.

I recognize that tens of millions of frustrated, angry and concerned minds are trying to make sense of it all and reorient themselves. This presents a giant opportunity, but also very real danger. All the emotion being felt currently can be channeled into negative avenues such as violence, aimless spectacles, Trump martyrdom or a futile search for the next political savior guaranteed to disappoint, or it can be channeled in productive ways. That’s why I’m here writing this post at this moment. Enough people are finally motivated to respond, but what really matters is the nature of this response. The dominant aggregate reaction is what will determine the future.

Most of us eagerly, or more likely lazily, embraced the current insipid and dull paradigm in the name of convenience, low prices, and free shipping, but we never stopped to consider the sacrifices made along the way. We swallowed it whole, became comfortable fat and happy, and now the facade’s about to be slowly stripped away unless we bend the knee to an ever narrowing Overton Window of speech and behavior parameters. It begins with social media purges, but it won’t end there. All the special things we sacrificed from the prior era are gone, yet the consequences are here to stay. We can’t run and hide hoping to be the last one hauled off to the abattoir. It’s time to step up.

In this regard, I have a simple suggestion. Cancel Yourself. Unshackle yourself mentally from our suffocating and bland corporate culture while you still have a chance to do it voluntarily. Cancel yourself before they have a chance to cancel you. In this there is power. You’re taking charge and acting proactively as opposed to reacting. We need to play the game on our own terms, because the game’s coming for us either way. If you were a Trump supporter, forget about him. If you held your nose and voted for Biden, don’t expect anything good. If you’re a Sanders supporter, forget it, he’s done. Most importantly, don’t waste time and energy thinking about 2024 and who might run. A lot of really bad stuff can happen between now and then and there may not be much of a country left at that point. Focus on today and focus on what you’re willing to do personally in the near-term.

Once you’ve made the decision to preemptively cancel yourself, start thinking about specific steps you’re willing or able to take from there. Personally, this has been a 10 year+ journey that began when I quit my lucrative Wall Street job and left New York City permanently. It then expanded to public writing, cultivating a social media presence, and developing a passion for gardening. While all these actions brought me to where I am, the biggest realization I had along the way was that I need to focus most of my energy on the things I can control and my own state of consciousness.

The future won’t be determined by whether or not there’s a response, because there’s always some sort of response. What matters most is the specific nature of humanity’s dominant response. Will it be a frothing, violence soaked reptilian reaction, or will it be intelligent, wise, conscious and asymmetric. If we confront the national security state oligarchy by conventional means, we’ll end up with another conventional world, and one that’s potentially worse than this one. If we want something fundamentally distinct and better, we had better respond thoughtfully. Rejecting a tepid paradigm is an important first step, but it does not in itself guarantee a better one. The ends don’t justify the means, the means are everything.

This post has been mostly theoretical and philosophical thus far, so let’s shift gears and get practical. The world we’ve become so dependent on is quickly being turned against anyone who refuses to conform to what amounts to some mangled form of corporate sanctioned, woke imperialism. If you don’t acquiesce fully you’ll be removed eventually. The primary form of leverage being used to bend us into submission are the corporate tools and services we’ve become so dependent on, most explicitly big tech, but increasingly internet infrastructure more broadly. They think they’ve got us trapped via our dependence on these conveniences and addictions, but do they really? What can we do in response?

When thinking about this, it makes sense to look at Bitcoin for some guidance. What first got me involved nearly a decade ago was a keen understanding of how a digital world dominated by centralized digital currencies could be easily weaponized against the entire planet. As such, I and countless others around the world have embraced this revolutionary protocol governed by rules, not rulers. A means of sending value across the planet digitally that’s permissionless, peer-to-peer, decentralized and censorship resistant. There’s no CEO, no one individual human to coerce or pressure in order to change the rules. It’s a politically neutral global money in a world becoming overwhelmed with a willingness to use centralized technological services and hardware for political ends. An oasis in a desert of topdown control. So what can we learn from Bitcoin?

For starters, no one can stop you from sending bitcoin to whoever you want, which is the same sort of principle needed for online communication. Unpopular or even tasteless opinions are not a crime, but we’ve allowed tech oligarchs to act as judge and jury based on their own whims or political calculations. Even worse, they do this after having corralled everyone into their platforms by falsely claiming they served as public squares for free human expression. It’s been a gigantic bait and switch, and the lesson here is to never again rely on individuals to determine something as important as the acceptable parameters of human communication.

Which brings us to the crux of this post. The internet in its current form is dying — it has been for some time, — yet it is far from dead. We all continue to use our Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon products even though we know we shouldn’t. We’ve all become hostages to convenience and now an omnipresent sword of cancel culture hangs over our collective heads. As such, we have some important decisions to make. We can choose to constantly alter our minds and speech to conform to a growing mob of ridiculousness, or we can fix the internet itself.

As someone who’s in the process of preemptively canceling himself, I have little choice in the matter. We’re either going to transition to a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet, aka web 3.0, or the entire thing’s gonna become a sterile Potemkin Village of woke corporate imperialism and national security state talking points. I’m optimistic when it comes to the emergence of web 3.0 for several reasons, but mainly because I don’t think it’s plausible to give humanity freedom of expression via the web for a couple of decades and then just remove it for good and turn it into television. This doesn’t mean the transition will be quick or easy, but I do believe it’s probably inevitable.

If you’re on board with most of what’s been laid out here and are comfortable with canceling yourself, at least symbolically, the next choice you need to make is to determine what you can do to help usher in a different kind of paradigm. Each individual has different skills, temperaments, circumstances and commitments, so what degree of action one takes is a deeply personal decision. All I ask is that you think about how you can contribute to the goal of a more voluntary, decentralized, peaceful, conscious, cooperative, community-centered and networked world and how much time and energy you’re realistically willing to give the effort. Voting isn’t going to do it, we need direct action from millions upon millions of humans around the world.

In addition to the steps I’ve already taken in the past decade, there are several additional actions I’m committing myself to. First, given my determination that web 3.0 is critical to the future of human progress, I’ve committed myself in 2021 to getting up to speed on some of the most promising privacy and peer-to-peer technologies currently in existence, software and hardware alike. Although I don’t have the skillset to add to such projects, I do have the capacity to experiment with them and assess how far along we are and what needs to be done.

From what I know so far, there’s a lot of brainpower working on a multitude of different projects, but it’s unclear how far along and how user friendly they are. The reason this particular avenue is interesting to me is not just because it’s become increasingly necessary, but because we now have a critical mass of people ready to leave the centralized big tech products and services, but this won’t happen until web 3.0 is ready to onboard the average human relatively seamlessly. My objective is to determine how far along we are in this regard.

Beyond that, the recent decisions made by Twitter and big tech generally have once again driven the point home that it’s not wise for me to post all of my thoughts via such platforms, which was a motivating factor for spontaneously writing today’s post. I’ll continue to use Twitter because that’s how I’m able to reach the largest audience for now, but I have one foot out the door.

The next thing on my agenda is to step up efforts to launch a new website that more accurately reflects a new focus, which is not to convince, but to offer inspiration and suggestions about how we move forward as individuals and as a human race. That said, I won’t make any promises about how often I’ll be writing, because I have no idea. It’ll depend on a lot of things, including how well this post is received and how inspired I am to publish at any given moment. When I have something I really want to say I’ll write, and when I don’t, I won’t.

The big final request here for readers wanting to stay abreast of my work is to sign up for the email list (signup box found near the top right of the desktop version, and at the bottom of the mobile site). If I get canceled from Twitter, it’ll be much harder to reach out unless I have your email. Email lists have become very important once again.

AmRRON: Alternative Email and News Sources

With all of the de-platforming and banning of conservative sites and accounts, AmRRON has some suggestions for alternatives in Patriot Action Items: Alternative Email and News Sources.

In the wake of increasing censorship by left leaning internet-based services, conservative Christian patriots are finding themselves without news sources they can trust and ways of communicating with each other.

 

Here, I will cover two components of what I see as part of the solution:

  1. Email alternatives which offer increased privacy, security, and a degree of anonymity.
  2. News resources as alternatives to the corporate mainstream ‘fake news’ media.

 

EMAIL SERVICES:

We have received reports that Yahoo and Outlook email services have blocked user accounts

due to Christian/conservative views.

While this isn’t surprising, in fact it is to be expected, there are some great freedom-supporting services.

 

Protonmail  (Switzerland)

https://protonmail.com/

 

Tutanota (Germany) – has similar architecture as Protonmail, but as of 2009 Germany is a third party 5I participant.

https://tutanota.com/

 

CTemplar (Iceland)

https://ctemplar.com/

 

Anonynousspeech

(Servers randomly move around the world, not free)

https://www.anonymousspeech.com/

 

NOTE:  Unseen email.  We were strong proponents and users of unseen.is secure email, based in Iceland.

They have since closed their service and shut down the last of their servers.  If you see references to unseen email

in our Underground documentation or in postings on our AmRRON or Radio Free Redoubt websites, please disregard.

Those references are obsolete.

 

NEWS RESOURCES:

Stop watching or listening to any corporate mainstream news sources.

Avoid Drudge Report — Has since developed into anti-patriot propaganda arm.

Here are some excellent news alternatives:

 

Aggregate News Sites:

The Liberty Daily https://thelibertydaily.com/

Whatfinger https://www.whatfinger.com/

United Patriot News https://www.unitedpatriotnews.com/

 

Conservative News Outlets:

One America News Network https://www.oann.com/

Newsmax — After a Newsmax anchor walk-out of the Mypillow CEO, Mike Lindell, Newsmax is on probation, despite the anchor’s apology.

World Net Daily — https://www.wnd.com/

The Epoch Times https://www.theepochtimes.com/

Daybreak Insider http://www.daybreakinsider.com/

Zero Hedge https://www.zerohedge.com/

New American Magazine https://thenewamerican.com/

The Gateway Pundit  https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/

The Geller Report https://gellerreport.com/

MAGA Pill http://www.magapill.com/

United Patriots http://www.unitedpatriotsofamerica.com/news-and-articles

One News Now https://www.onenewsnow.com/

Breitbart https://www.breitbart.com/

Bongino Report https://bonginoreport.com/

Western Journal https://www.westernjournal.com/

 

*Activist Post https://www.activistpost.com/

*despite the Anarchist symbology, Activist Post actually tends to lean strongly toward libertarianism, and not ‘anarchist’.

 

REDOUBT/REGIONAL

https://redoubtnews.com/ (American Redoubt / PNW)

http://inlandnwreport.com/   (Inland NW / WA State)

https://gemstatepatriot.com/blog/ (Idaho)

https://northwestlibertynews.com/  (Montana)

 

Strategic and Analysis

https://unconstrainedanalytics.org/ Rich Higgins

https://clarionproject.org/

https://www.understandingthethreat.com/  John Guandalo

https://forwardobserver.com/  Sam Culper

Imprimis: Who Is in Control? The Need to Rein in Big Tech

The following is adapted from a speech delivered by Allum Bokhari, senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, at Hillsdale College on November 8, 2020, during a Center for Constructive Alternatives conference on Big Tech. Who Is in Control? The Need to Rein in Big Tech

In January, when every major Silicon Valley tech company permanently banned the President of the United States from its platform, there was a backlash around the world. One after another, government and party leaders—many of them ideologically opposed to the policies of President Trump—raised their voices against the power and arrogance of the American tech giants. These included the President of Mexico, the Chancellor of Germany, the government of Poland, ministers in the French and Australian governments, the neoliberal center-right bloc in the European Parliament, the national populist bloc in the European Parliament, the leader of the Russian opposition (who recently survived an assassination attempt), and the Russian government (which may well have been behind that attempt).

Common threats create strange bedfellows. Socialists, conservatives, nationalists, neoliberals, autocrats, and anti-autocrats may not agree on much, but they all recognize that the tech giants have accumulated far too much power. None like the idea that a pack of American hipsters in Silicon Valley can, at any moment, cut off their digital lines of communication.

I published a book on this topic prior to the November election, and many who called me alarmist then are not so sure of that now. I built the book on interviews with Silicon Valley insiders and five years of reporting as a Breitbart News tech correspondent. Breitbart created a dedicated tech reporting team in 2015—a time when few recognized the danger that the rising tide of left-wing hostility to free speech would pose to the vision of the World Wide Web as a free and open platform for all viewpoints.

This inversion of that early libertarian ideal—the movement from the freedom of information to the control of information on the Web—has been the story of the past five years.

***

When the Web was created in the 1990s, the goal was that everyone who wanted a voice could have one. All a person had to do to access the global marketplace of ideas was to go online and set up a website. Once created, the website belonged to that person. Especially if the person owned his own server, no one could deplatform him. That was by design, because the Web, when it was invented, was competing with other types of online services that were not so free and open.

It is important to remember that the Web, as we know it today—a network of websites accessed through browsers—was not the first online service ever created. In the 1990s, Sir Timothy Berners-Lee invented the technology that underpins websites and web browsers, creating the Web as we know it today. But there were other online services, some of which predated Berners-Lee’s invention. Corporations like CompuServe and Prodigy ran their own online networks in the 1990s—networks that were separate from the Web and had access points that were different from web browsers. These privately-owned networks were open to the public, but CompuServe and Prodigy owned every bit of information on them and could kick people off their networks for any reason.

In these ways the Web was different. No one owned it, owned the information on it, or could kick anyone off. That was the idea, at least, before the Web was captured by a handful of corporations.

We all know their names: Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon. Like Prodigy and CompuServe back in the ’90s, they own everything on their platforms, and they have the police power over what can be said and who can participate. But it matters a lot more today than it did in the ’90s. Back then, very few people used online services. Today everyone uses them—it is practically impossible not to use them. Businesses depend on them. News publishers depend on them. Politicians and political activists depend on them. And crucially, citizens depend on them for information.

Today, Big Tech doesn’t just mean control over online information. It means control over news. It means control over commerce. It means control over politics. And how are the corporate tech giants using their control? Judging by the three biggest moves they have made since I wrote my book—the censoring of the New York Post in October when it published its blockbuster stories on Biden family corruption, the censorship and eventual banning from the Web of President Trump, and the coordinated takedown of the upstart social media site Parler—it is obvious that Big Tech’s priority today is to support the political Left and the Washington establishment.

Big Tech has become the most powerful election-influencing machine in American history. It is not an exaggeration to say that if the technologies of Silicon Valley are allowed to develop to their fullest extent, without any oversight or checks and balances, then we will never have another free and fair election. But the power of Big Tech goes beyond the manipulation of political behavior. As one of my Facebook sources told me in an interview for my book: “We have thousands of people on the platform who have gone from far right to center in the past year, so we can build a model from those people and try to make everyone else on the right follow the same path.” Let that sink in. They don’t just want to control information or even voting behavior—they want to manipulate people’s worldview.

Is it too much to say that Big Tech has prioritized this kind of manipulation? Consider that Twitter is currently facing a lawsuit from a victim of child sexual abuse who says that the company repeatedly failed to take down a video depicting his assault, and that it eventually agreed to do so only after the intervention of an agent from the Department of Homeland Security. So Twitter will take it upon itself to ban the President of the United States, but is alleged to have taken down child pornography only after being prodded by federal law enforcement.

***

How does Big Tech go about manipulating our thoughts and behavior? It begins with the fact that these tech companies strive to know everything about us—our likes and dislikes, the issues we’re interested in, the websites we visit, the videos we watch, who we voted for, and our party affiliation. If you search for a Hannukah recipe, they’ll know you’re likely Jewish. If you’re running down the Yankees, they’ll figure out if you’re a Red Sox fan. Even if your smart phone is turned off, they’ll track your location. They know who you work for, who your friends are, when you’re walking your dog, whether you go to church, when you’re standing in line to vote, and on and on.

As I already mentioned, Big Tech also monitors how our beliefs and behaviors change over time. They identify the types of content that can change our beliefs and behavior, and they put that knowledge to use. They’ve done this openly for a long time to manipulate consumer behavior—to get us to click on certain ads or buy certain products. Anyone who has used these platforms for an extended period of time has no doubt encountered the creepy phenomenon where you’re searching for information about a product or a service—say, a microwave—and then minutes later advertisements for microwaves start appearing on your screen. These same techniques can be used to manipulate political opinions.

I mentioned that Big Tech has recently demonstrated ideological bias. But it is equally true that these companies have huge economic interests at stake in politics. The party that holds power will determine whether they are going to get government contracts, whether they’re going to get tax breaks, and whether and how their industry will be regulated. Clearly, they have a commercial interest in political control—and currently no one is preventing them from exerting it.

To understand how effective Big Tech’s manipulation could become, consider the feedback loop.

As Big Tech constantly collects data about us, they run tests to see what information has an impact on us. Let’s say they put a negative news story about someone or something in front of us, and we don’t click on it or read it. They keep at it until they find content that has the desired effect. The feedback loop constantly improves, and it does so in a way that’s undetectable.

What determines what appears at the top of a person’s Facebook feed, Twitter feed, or Google search results? Does it appear there because it’s popular or because it’s gone viral? Is it there because it’s what you’re interested in? Or is there another reason Big Tech wants it to be there? Is it there because Big Tech has gathered data that suggests it’s likely to nudge your thinking or your behavior in a certain direction? How can we know?

What we do know is that Big Tech openly manipulates the content people see. We know, for example, that Google reduced the visibility of Breitbart News links in search results by 99 percent in 2020 compared to the same period in 2016. We know that after Google introduced an update last summer, clicks on Breitbart News stories from Google searches for “Joe Biden” went to zero and stayed at zero through the election. This didn’t happen gradually, but in one fell swoop—as if Google flipped a switch. And this was discoverable through the use of Google’s own traffic analysis tools, so it isn’t as if Google cared that we knew about it.

Speaking of flipping switches, I have noted that President Trump was collectively banned by Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and every other social media platform you can think of. But even before that, there was manipulation going on. Twitter, for instance, reduced engagement on the President’s tweets by over eighty percent. Facebook deleted posts by the President for spreading so-called disinformation.

But even more troubling, I think, are the invisible things these companies do. Consider “quality ratings.” Every Big Tech platform has some version of this, though some of them use different names. The quality rating is what determines what appears at the top of your search results, or your Twitter or Facebook feed, etc. It’s a numerical value based on what Big Tech’s algorithms determine in terms of “quality.” In the past, this score was determined by criteria that were somewhat objective: if a website or post contained viruses, malware, spam, or copyrighted material, that would negatively impact its quality score. If a video or post was gaining in popularity, the quality score would increase. Fair enough.

Over the past several years, however—and one can trace the beginning of the change to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016—Big Tech has introduced all sorts of new criteria into the mix that determines quality scores. Today, the algorithms on Google and Facebook have been trained to detect “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “authoritative” (as opposed to “non-authoritative”) sources. Algorithms analyze a user’s network, so that whatever users follow on social media—e.g., “non-authoritative” news outlets—affects the user’s quality score. Algorithms also detect the use of language frowned on by Big Tech—e.g., “illegal immigrant” (bad) in place of “undocumented immigrant” (good)—and adjust quality scores accordingly. And so on.

This is not to say that you are informed of this or that you can look up your quality score. All of this happens invisibly. It is Silicon Valley’s version of the social credit system overseen by the Chinese Communist Party. As in China, if you defy the values of the ruling elite or challenge narratives that the elite labels “authoritative,” your score will be reduced and your voice suppressed. And it will happen silently, without your knowledge.

This technology is even scarier when combined with Big Tech’s ability to detect and monitor entire networks of people. A field of computer science called “network analysis” is dedicated to identifying groups of people with shared interests, who read similar websites, who talk about similar things, who have similar habits, who follow similar people on social media, and who share similar political viewpoints. Big Tech companies are able to detect when particular information is flowing through a particular network—if there’s a news story or a post or a video, for instance, that’s going viral among conservatives or among voters as a whole. This gives them the ability to shut down a story they don’t like before it gets out of hand. And these systems are growing more sophisticated all the time.

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If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress existing political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it, because it would place us forever under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.

The good news is, there is a way to rein in the tyrannical tech giants. And the way is simple: take away their power to filter information and filter data on our behalf.

All of Big Tech’s power comes from their content filters—the filters on “hate speech,” the filters on “misinformation,” the filters that distinguish “authoritative” from “non-authoritative” sources, etc. Right now these filters are switched on by default. We as individuals can’t turn them off. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The most important demand we can make of lawmakers and regulators is that Big Tech be forbidden from activating these filters without our knowledge and consent. They should be prohibited from doing this—and even from nudging us to turn on a filter—under penalty of losing their Section 230 immunity as publishers of third party content. This policy should be strictly enforced, and it should extend even to seemingly non-political filters like relevance and popularity. Anything less opens the door to manipulation.

Our ultimate goal should be a marketplace in which third party companies would be free to design filters that could be plugged into services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In other words, we would have two separate categories of companies: those that host content and those that create filters to sort through that content. In a marketplace like that, users would have the maximum level of choice in determining their online experiences. At the same time, Big Tech would lose its power to manipulate our thoughts and behavior and to ban legal content—which is just a more extreme form of filtering—from the Web.

This should be the standard we demand, and it should be industry-wide. The alternative is a kind of digital serfdom. We don’t allow old-fashioned serfdom anymore—individuals and businesses have due process and can’t be evicted because their landlord doesn’t like their politics. Why shouldn’t we also have these rights if our business or livelihood depends on a Facebook page or a Twitter or YouTube account?

This is an issue that goes beyond partisanship. What the tech giants are doing is so transparently unjust that all Americans should start caring about it—because under the current arrangement, we are all at their mercy. The World Wide Web was meant to liberate us. It is now doing the opposite. Big Tech is increasingly in control. The most pressing question today is: how are we going to take control back? 

Independent Institute: Big Tech’s Gravest Sin? Working with the Security State

From the Independent Institute, Big Tech’s Gravest Sin? Working with the Security State . There is an argument that Big Tech censorship is not a violation of free speech because they are private entities. But when those Big Tech companies get financially entangled with the government, who can say when quid pro quo censorship is occurring?

The “de-platforming” of Donald Trump by Twitter, Facebook, and Google-owned YouTube—that is, Big Tech—recently garnered big headlines. Trump’s change in status has raised cries among some conservatives of “censorship.” Yet a more libertarian view holds that these are private companies that have a right to control their own content, just as private broadcast and print media do. The word “censorship” has been traditionally and more appropriately applied to government violations of the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of free speech.

More disturbing might be Big Tech’s aiding of law enforcement’s violations of the rights of individuals at home and contributions to the military’s violation of human rights abroad. Despite its reputation for independence, it has recently been revealed that Big Tech’s relationship with the American national security establishment may be stronger than was previously thought. At some tech firms, workforce opposition has arisen over company contracts with the military and law enforcement. Yet these employee objections have usually led the companies to hide such government business through the use of mundane and nondescript subcontractors.

Big Tech has had a long-standing relationship with the U.S. government and military. During World War II, the government used IBM’s punch card technology to keep track of prisoners at unconstitutional domestic internment camps housing Japanese Americans, who even government reports admitted posed no threat to the American war effort. (At the same time, Nazi Germany was using similar IBM technology.) The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense (DoD) funded research on computing in the 1960s that led to the Internet and later to Siri. Such spinoffs are beneficial, but it is more efficient for the private sector to invest in them directly. Less positively, Honeywell Aerospace manufactured fragmentation bombs, which killed many civilians during the Vietnam War. Silicon Valley was no stranger to military contracts, with Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin), builder of military aircraft, missiles, satellites, and other defense systems, being the biggest player there during the 1980s.

Nowadays, Big Tech companies have loads of contracts with the military and law enforcement. Tech Inquiry, a non-profit organization promoting tech accountability, has reported that DoD, ICE, FBI, DEA, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons have thousands of contracts with Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Dell, IBM, and Hewlett Packard. Microsoft is by far the contract champion, with 5,000. Amazon and Google trail with 350 and 250, respectively.

For example, Amazon’s facial Rekognition software could easily be misused by the government, yet the company is still marketing it to government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Furthermore, Amazon’s cloud services are employed by Palantir, a company that creates databases for ICE. Microsoft even admits that its software allows ICE to “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification” of immigrants. Dell also licenses software to ICE.

Google was involved in Project Maven to provide artificial intelligence for U.S. drone warfare in foreign nations. American presidents have used drones to illegally kill people, including Barack Obama’s assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Awlaki was an American citizen, killed by his own government without charges, a trial, or sentencing. Almost 4,000 Google employees demanded the company end the contract and some resigned over it. Yet Google is now providing off-the-shelf technology for drones.

Big Tech is even helping foreign governments conduct what can be legitimately called “censorship.” For example, Google, in a project called Dragonfly, sold the oppressive Chinese government a censored version of its search engine. Microsoft beat out Amazon for a whopping $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract to provide cloud computing for DoD.

Big Tech should be leery of working with both the U.S. and foreign governments—and not only because many of their employees object to contracts that can result in deaths or the violation of human rights. Government money never comes without strings attached. Contracting with the government will bring a slew of regulations that can change the commercial nature of any business, rendering it less creative and innovative.

Nonetheless this admonition may fall on deaf ears—because the government is so big and spends so much money in the private sector that it is hard for tech companies to avoid being tempted by its pot of gold. Although it pretends differently, Big Tech has a long and lucrative relationship with government contracting and, unfortunately, that business will probably continue to grow in the future.

Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen Says Censorship Will Get Worse

Norwegian bushcrafter Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen says censorship will get worse as Apple CEO calls for more censorship of social media. Of course, Apple CEO Tim Cook has a history of pro-censorship rhetoric; back in 2018 he called it a sin not to attack people with whom you don’t agree and celebrated the banning of users who held disagreeable opinions.