Category Archives: media

The War on Free Speech Is Really a War on the Right to Criticize the Government

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet.”— Justice William O. Douglas

Absolutely, there is a war on free speech.

To be more accurate, however, the war on free speech is really a war on the right to criticize the government.

Although the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom, every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

Indeed, those who run the government don’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

In fact, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

For instance, as part of its campaign to eradicate so-called “disinformation,” the Biden Administration likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative.

In his first few years in office, President Trump declared the media to be “the enemy of the people,” suggested that protesting should be illegal, and that NFL players who kneel in protest during the national anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.”

Then again, Trump was not alone in his presidential disregard for the rights of the citizenry, especially as it pertains to the right of the people to criticize those in power.

President Obama signed into law anti-protest legislation that makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest activities (10 years in prison for protesting anywhere in the vicinity of a Secret Service agent). The Obama Administration also waged a war on whistleblowers, which The Washington Post described as “the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration,” and “spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records.”

Part of the Patriot Act signed into law by President George W. Bush made it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated by the government as a terrorist organization. Under this provision, even filing an amicus brief on behalf of an organization the government has labeled as terrorist would constitute breaking the law.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the FBI to censor all news and control communications in and out of the country in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt also signed into law the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate by way of speech for the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence.

President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to criticize the government’s war efforts.

President Abraham Lincoln seized telegraph lines, censored mail and newspaper dispatches, and shut down members of the press who criticized his administration.

In 1798, during the presidency of John Adams, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to “write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous, and malicious” statements against the government, Congress or president of the United States.

Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now.

Good, bad or ugly, it’s all free speech unless as defined by the government it falls into one of the following categories: obscenity, fighting words, defamation (including libel and slander), child pornography, perjury, blackmail, incitement to imminent lawless action, true threats, and solicitations to commit crimes.

This idea of “dangerous” speech, on the other hand, is peculiarly authoritarian in nature. What it amounts to is speech that the government fears could challenge its chokehold on power.

The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself.

Stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus—and recite some of the rhetoric used by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams and Thomas Paine without referencing them as the authors.

For that matter, just try reciting the Declaration of Independence, which rejects tyranny, establishes Americans as sovereign beings, recognizes God (not the government) as the Supreme power, portrays the government as evil, and provides a detailed laundry list of abuses that are as relevant today as they were 240-plus years ago.

My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

Try suggesting, as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin did, that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties, and you might find yourself placed on a terrorist watch list and vulnerable to being rounded up by government agents.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Better yet, try suggesting as Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry did that Americans should, if necessary, defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights, and you will be labeled a domestic extremist.

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine. “When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.” Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.” And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Then again, perhaps you don’t need to test the limits of free speech for yourself.

One such test is playing out before our very eyes on the national stage led by those who seem to believe that only individuals who agree with the government are entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

To the contrary, James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was very clear about the fact that the First Amendment was established to protect the minority against the majority.

I’ll take that one step further: the First Amendment was intended to protect the citizenry from the government’s tendency to censor, silence and control what people say and think.

Having lost our tolerance for free speech in its most provocative, irritating and offensive forms, the American people have become easy prey for a police state where only government speech is allowed.

You see, the powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

Tolerance for dissent is vital if we are to survive as a free nation.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

By suppressing free speech, the government is contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”

Mind you, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, what politics you subscribe to, or what God you worship: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are all potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.

USAID Board Member Says ‘New World Order’ will Continue Despite a Rising Multipolar World

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

That same old American institution called the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) who supports regime change and wars across the world has a board member who wrote an opinion piece for The Hill, a liberal online news organization on the relevance of the rules-based order and how much the world needs it.  Harley Lippman, a board member for USAID wrote about how the rules-based order (New World Order) will continue despite the challenges of a multipolar world and the peace dividends it has brought to the table thus far.  Lippman’s claims about where the rules-based order stands in this new world of geopolitics is propaganda at its best, so you might already know where this article is going since the liberal media is absolutely pro-establishment and pro-war.  

Lippman wrote an opinion piece called ‘The rules-based order will endure, despite ‘shifting sands’ based on Russia and China’s achievements that includes establishing a diplomatic solution between Iran and Saudi Arabia and bringing back Syria into the fold with the rest of the Middle East which is a big deal, but to Lippman, it “rings hollow”, its insincere:

Russia and China recently have attempted to act as chief mediators on the international stage. Russia reportedly facilitated meetings between Saudi Arabia and Syria to restore ties and reopen their respective consular services, and China played peacemaker between Saudi Arabia and Iran. More recently, Saudi Arabia’s Cabinet approved a decision to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a dialogue partner. The SCO was created to counter U.S. economic hegemony and includes longtime adversaries and partners of our country. These recent developments have been described by some as evidence of the decline of the U.S.-led rules-based order.

Despite the clamoring of pundits to bemoan America’s decline, Moscow and Beijing’s attempts at diplomatic relevance ring hollow as the U.S. shores up the post-World War II international order by reinvigorating existing strategic alliances that underpin various security architectures

Lippman says that the US-led rules-based order is in decline but at the same time, it is working on replenishing its old alliances as a counterweight to Russia and China even though they were able to forge a peaceful solution among nations who were at odds against each other at one time or another.  However, Russia and China are trying to establish real peaceful solutions among nations and that should be welcomed by the international community.  Lippman says that “the U.S. values its alliance with Japan and South Korea in the Asia-Pacific to serve as a counterweight to an increasingly belligerent China.”  A belligerent China?  How many military bases does the US have around the world?  In fact, how many of these bases surround China?  China’s peace initiatives should be welcomed at all costs.  Bringing peace is a good thing while the US and its Western allies (and Israel) has brought endless wars and chaos on almost every continent on the planet, in fact the US war machine has killed more than 20 million people since World War II.  In other words, when Lippman says that the US “values” its alliance with Japan and South Korea, he is talking about the continuation of selling them military hardware and keeping the same US bases in place to counter China’s growing influence in the region so that the US war machine can keep antagonizing China in the South Pacific sea at all costs even if it means starting a war.   

Lippman also takes aim at Russia, “Correspondingly, America’s role in NATO is pivotal to the West’s efforts to face off an aggressive Russia that threatens the security of Europe and the Balkans.”  Seriously?  Wasn’t Ukraine’s continuous bombardment of the Eastern Donbass region for more than 8 years killing at least 8,000 Ukrainian people who spoke Russian an aggressive action that was and still is supported by the US-NATO alliance? 

The US has used its alliances to counter Russia and China as part of the old rules-based order strategy of divide and conquer in Asia and Eastern Europe.  In other words, he wants Washington to keep the same policies of funding and arming one-side against another to advance the US war machine and continue the rules-based order to establish their Great Reset agenda.  

Concerning the Middle East, Russia and China also have a wide range of interests with Iran, therefore that arrangement angers the US political establishment and their bosses who are based in Israel, and that’s the other problem for Lippman:

In contrast to America’s values-based approach to allies and partners, engagement with Russia and China offers only a transactional and interest-based relationship that rests on economic ties both countries share equally with such aggressors as Iran and Iran’s proxies 

Russia and China’s strategic partnership with Iran, Syria and now Saudi Arabia bypasses US interests in the region so for most of the people in the Middle East, it’s a new development that is welcomed in a region that has only experienced regime change and endless wars that the US and its closest ally, Israel sponsored and at times participated in since the end of World War II:   

Riyadh’s decision to restore diplomatic relations with Tehran via China is an attempt to reduce regional tensions with an aggressive neighbor committed to militant Islam and regional hegemony. In the near term, Tehran will likely seek to avoid actions that threaten this new relationship. However, absent an Iranian decision to radically redefine its foreign policy and abolish the Revolutionary Guards, this rapprochement is likely to collapse in the wake of fresh Iranian violence

First, let me start by saying that Iran is not looking to expand into a hegemonic footprint in the Middle East, it is Israel who is looking to expand its territorial ambitions by hoping to destroy all its Arab neighbors’ piece by piece and carry-out Oded Yinon’s plan or what is known as the “Greater Israel” project.  Rabbi Fischmann, a member of the Jewish Agency for Palestine testified to the U.N. Special Committee of Enquiry on July 9th, 1947, said that “the Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.” But Iran is the aggressor?  The rules-based order will continue if the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) focuses on its security commitments according to Lippman:

America’s security commitment to the region must be paramount. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) remains the foundation of the region’s security architecture that protects trade and energy arteries critical to global economic stability. The Biden administration should ensure that CENTCOM remains well-resourced and focused on building regional partnerships. Furthermore, economic ties must be strengthened. American firms view the region with enthusiasm. The Biden administration must be more vocal in its support for trade and expedite approvals for technology sharing on 5G and 6G communications, green energy, and space. Furthermore, increased cabinet-level visits to the region would demonstrate the U.S.’s commitment to the region. While this will not offset the inevitable commercial relationships between the Gulf States and China, it will assert America’s ability to compete in this strategic region

Using the Sunni-Shiite argument is propaganda to further instigate that there is a sectarian divide in the Arab world for thousands of years’, and the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and because of that, the US security structure under CENTCOM will remain in place since the US and Saudi Arabia has a long-standing relationship.  China’s peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia is what he calls “cosmetic”, and that China has no place for its peace initiative in the Middle East:

Despite the region’s “shifting sands” of ever-changing relationships, the Sunni-Shiite tensions are over a thousand years old and Iran’s advancement toward nuclear status has every U.S. partner in the Middle East on alert. The traditional security architecture underpinned by U.S.-Saudi strategic ties will remain intact. As a result, future Chinese transactional neutrality is likely to be cosmetic, devoid of any significant strategic substance. 

The U.S. and its allies can best sustain the rules-based order established after WWII through robust engagement with allies and partners in which we show that we understand and support their core economic and security interests in the same way that we expect they will do the same for American interests

Tell that to the families of the 20 million people that US and its NATO allies killed since the end of World War II.  The old rules-based order has collapsed in the face of a new multipolar world, as for Harley Lippman’s vision for the US and its globalist cabal to continue its hegemonic agenda in this new world of ours, is just wishful thinking.       

Being a Radical Has Led Me to Sometimes Live a Double Life

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Is that a good thing?

By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

Throughout the 2000s, you’d find me regularly riding NYC’s subways during the very early morning hours — specifically from Queens into Manhattan — to work with personal training clients in gyms. In fact, right up to the plandemic, I was still training a couple of clients in their homes.

On those subway rides, I’d sometimes grab a copy of Metro — one of NYC’s free newspapers delivering a daily dose of corporate media propaganda. However, there was a brief period of time when Metro would allow some subversive voices into the mix. That included yours truly.

From about 2004 to 2007, Metro went through a phase of paying edgy freelancers so I jumped in with both feet. This even included an author photo shoot!

Thus, for a couple of years, my decidedly non-mainstream perspective — and my decidedly non-mainstream photo (wearing a “dumpster diving team” t-shirt, no less) — were on display for millions of New Yorkers to peruse during their morning ride to work or school (see image up top).

As someone who can remember when newspaper columnists held sway in my hometown, let me tell you, it was pretty cool to be jammed into a crowded subway car next to someone reading my latest article.

I’ll never know how many New Yorkers read my Metro columns. To the best of my knowledge, none of my affluent clients saw my column or photo (probably because none of them would ever ride the subway).

Over the years, I did make a select few clients aware of my double life (a couple have even bought my books and attended my talks). But, since many of them were wealthy and mainstream, I typically chose not to divulge anything about my radical writing.

As a result, I sometimes found myself making up elaborate fabrications to account for why I wouldn’t be around for a day or two when, for example, I just so happened to be heading up to MIT to lecture on US foreign policy in 2003.

Yep, this high school grad addressed a huge audience there on the topic of Henry Kissinger and the 1973 Chilean coup on a Monday night… and by Wednesday morning, was back in the gym — working with dumbbells (insert rimshot here).

Looking back now, I ponder my strategy of keeping a big part of myself a secret in the name of maintaining personal trainer income. Why was I so sure that wealthy capitalists would shun me and maybe fire me as their trainer if they encountered my radical mindset?

Perhaps a better question: What did it do to me emotionally to hide something that’s always been very important to me?

I contemplate questions like this now because, well… it’s never too late. I may not have affluent gym clients anymore. But, in Covid-era NYC, I have plenty of others around whom I could start speaking far more openly.

After all, it’s not like I can’t point to cases from the 2000s when my double life was exposed and things went well.

For example, I trained three high-powered lawyers at their high-powered law firm’s gym. This arrangement required me to check in with the doorman — or was he a concierge? (It’s funny to me that I might insult a concierge by calling him a doorman.) Anyway, doormen display one of three basic behavior patterns towards personal trainers.

The first and most common is indifference (we’re used to that). Secondly, they relate to us as fellow blue-collar common people saddled with the same fate: serving the well-heeled. Lastly, in a futile attempt to align themselves with a winner, some doormen openly look down their noses at us.

This was definitely the case at the law firm until a certain concierge saw my handsome face staring back at him from the pages of Metro.

The guy was completely flabbergasted when he read a little something of mine called “Re-Examining Rumsfeld’s Ratio” (which talked about, among other things, the United States unselfconsciously using “Apache” helicopters to quell “ethnic cleansing”).

A political junkie, the concierge now saw me as an “expert” and fell all over himself to shake my hand and introduce himself.

My new best friend could not get enough of me and it became the new norm for him to quiz me about current events before and after my training sessions.

One morning, as I was passing through the lobby, he called me over and pulled out a legal pad. Believe it or not, he had written a page or two of notes to remember all the things he wanted to ask me!

Yeah, just another tricky day in the life of a muscular militant… 

In 2001-2, I worked evenings in a corporate gym (cue the shame and self-loathing) in midtown Manhattan. One night, I was wearing a Yankees t-shirt with the name “Justice” emblazoned on the back (for former Yank David Justice).

A woman named Mary, probably in her late 60s, asked me if I was a Yankee fan. I told her my real reason for wearing the shirt was all about the word “justice.” She smiled and declared that justice was a “noble idea.”

I braced myself for the inevitable “we need to show those towel heads some justice,” (remember, this was early post-9/11 NYC) but instead, Mary told me — albeit in a stage whisper — she was soon going to DC to march against the impending US invasion of Iraq.

After this confession, Mary looked genuinely nervous. Her facial expression seemed to ask: Have I gone too far? In my best French Resistance voice, I reassured her: “Don’t worry, I’m with you.”

After that, we’d talk each and every time she’d come to work out. The corporation eventually phased out its gym facility but just before my last day, I saw Mary and complimented her on how hard she’d been training.

She leaned close to me and whispered: “When the revolution comes, I’ll be ready.”

As for me, my next revolution is to be even more open and transparent about my “controversial” stances. No more hiding.

After all, “a truthful witness saves lives.”

A State of Never-Ending Crisis: The Government Is Fomenting Mass Hysteria

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“This country has been having a nationwide nervous breakdown since 9/11. A nation of people suddenly broke, the market economy goes to shit, and they’re threatened on every side by an unknown, sinister enemy. But I don’t think fear is a very effective way of dealing with things—of responding to reality. Fear is just another word for ignorance.”—Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a spate of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Take this latest shooting in Nashville, Tenn.

The 28-year-old shooter (a clearly troubled transgender individual in possession of several military-style weapons) opened fire in a Christian elementary school, killing three children and three adults.

Already, fingers are being pointed and battle lines are being drawn.

Those who want safety at all costs are clamoring for more gun control measures (if not at an outright ban on assault weapons for non-military, non-police personnel), widespread mental health screening of the general population, more threat assessments and behavioral sensing warnings, more CCTV cameras with facial recognition capabilities, more “See Something, Say Something” programs aimed at turning Americans into snitches and spies, more metal detectors and whole-body imaging devices at soft targets, more roaming squads of militarized police empowered to do random bag searches, more fusion centers to centralize and disseminate information to law enforcement agencies, and more surveillance of what Americans say and do, where they go, what they buy and how they spend their time.

This is all part of the Deep State’s master plan.

Ask yourselves: why are we being bombarded with crises, distractions, fake news and reality TV politics? We’re being conditioned like lab mice to subsist on a steady diet of bread-and-circus politics and an endless spate of crises.

Caught up in this “crisis of the now,” the average person has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork in order to keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality.

As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:

“This psychological bombardment is waged primarily via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer by the hour with images of violence, war, emotions and conflict. Because the human nervous system is hard wired to focus on immediate threats accompanied by depictions of violence, mainstream media viewers have their attention and mental resources funneled into the never-ending ‘crisis of the NOW’ from which they can never have the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or historical context.”

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

All the while, the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.

When we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.

In other words, it’s all fake, i.e., manufactured, i.e., manipulated to distort reality.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

Reality and fiction merge as everything around us becomes entertainment fodder.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

Labelling something as “fake news” is a masterful way of dismissing truth that may run counter to the ruling power’s own narrative.

As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”

In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

Substack: Dead Man Walking

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The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian eradication of free speech is the theatrical takedown of Jack Teixeira.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

The latest salvo by ADL against the First Amendment dovetails with a congressional push to further erode liberty with its draconian RESTRICT Act. There are a number of tweets that encapsulate the latest threat to liberty, but Substack no longer allows tweet embeds, thanks to an absurd ego-colliding tiff between Substack CEO Chris Best and Twitter boss, Elon Musk.

The RESTRICT Act is dressed up as a response to Tik Tok and China. Contrary to this propaganda, it will be used primarily to sanitize the internet and squash (and criminalize) all speech diverting from USG narratives.

“The Restrict Act Completes the Overthrow of the US Constitution,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The purpose is to silence all dissent from official explanations. Truth is criminalized. Propaganda and lies will reign supreme and unchallenged. The Matrix will be complete.”

Connor O’Keeffe writes for the Mises Institute,

With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian control over free speech is the theatrical SWAT takedown of 21-year-old patsy Jack Teixeira, a low-level National Guard airman that, according to The Washington Post, somehow managed to get his hands on highly classified CIA and DOD documents. This is highly improbable, but then a blindsided American public is routinely fed improbable lies, exaggerations, and omissions by the USG and its corporate propaganda media.

CNN describes the event as a “carefully choreographed arrest,” and I’d agree with that assessment, although not as a result of the “Biden administration’s scramble” to contain sensitive leaks. The theatrical takedown of Mr. Teixeira is a propaganda event designed to bolster further eradication of dissent and grease the skids for the passage of RESTRICT.

The Washington Post has a documented history of working with the CIA to disseminate propaganda, so when we learn that the newspaper “wrote about the presence of problematic content on Substack, noting its use by spreaders of false information,” according to the ADL, we know for certain Substack will be brought to heel. (For more on the CIA’s takeover of the media, see The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn).

Add to this the Digital Services Act. It is “the EU’s latest incoming tech rulebook requiring them to stamp out illegal content on their platforms… including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. These include quickly taking down flagged illegal content, including hate speech,” Politico reported last October. The corporate propaganda conduit conflated “hate speech” (that is, speech contrary to the narratives of the state) with “child pornography and terrorist videos.”

According to Slate, the Digital Services Act (DSA),

while written to protect EU residents, will almost certainly lead social media firms to change their moderation policies worldwide. Thus, with the DSA, the EU will effectively be doing what the First Amendment ostensibly prohibits our own government from doing: regulating the editorial judgments made by social media platforms on which Americans communicate with each other.

The jaws of the authoritarian vice are tightening. In the near future, the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives. All avenues of expression are to be tightly monitored, moderated and censored at the behest of the state.

“The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks,” NBC News reported on April 12. “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”

Undoubtedly, this will include Substack, one of the last remaining platforms where free speech is permissible without the heavy-handed interference of the state, and the narrowly focused and highly politicized censorship agenda of the ADL and other anti-First Amendment organizations.

Fox News Decision to settle Dominion lawsuit for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars makes no sense

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

Something fishy here.  

First, corporate executives don’t give away $787 million of shareholders’ money without a test of the claim in court.  The uncontested amount is so large that one wonders if Fox News itself paid it or whether this almost $800 million was a gift funneled through an uncontested lawsuit to fund Dominion by our ruling elites. Once elections are determined by how voting machines are programmed, the people are disenfranchised.

Second, it is not defamation to report the news.  Tucker Carlson reported the claims of experts.  That is news reporting.  Dominion’s defamation lawsuit should have been filed against the experts.  It wasn’t, because the experts had the evidence.

Third, Experts supplied evidence that the Dominion voting machines could be programmed to count votes differently from how the votes were cast; experts supplied evidence that the machines could be hacked; experts supplied evidence that the voting machines were connected to the Internet.  Fox News could have called these experts as expert witnesses. By agreeing to settle, Fox News refused the evidence its day in court.  Why?

A possible explanation is that Fox News, voluntarily or involuntarily, participated in an orchestration that established the precedent that reporting news different from the narrative, or news that is unfavorable to a person, company, or government institution, is defamation.  Think about what this means.  A prosecutor who charges a person with a crime has defamed the person.  Truth becomes unreportable. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh could be charged for defamation, and for being a Russian agent, for reporting that the US government destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline. 

When we see the few truth-tellers who are the stars of their organizations jettisoned–Tucker Carlson from Fox News, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone, Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, James O’Keefe from Project Veritas, President Trump charged under a non-existent law, and Wikileaks’ Julian Assange imprisoned for a decade without due process, we must face the fact that there is an organized conspiracy to suppress truth.  We are experiencing the completion of The Matrix in which expressed doubt or even unspoken suspicion of official narratives are criminal offenses.  

Truth-tellers receive almost nonexistent support.  The inescapable conclusion is that in the Western world truth has no future.

Tyranny is upon us.

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This 

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By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Brownstone Institute

On a video podcast the other day, I made reference to the lockdown orders of March 2020. The host turned off the recording. He said it was fine to talk about this subject but from now on please refer to “the events of March 2020” with no specifics. 

Otherwise, it will be taken down by YouTube and Facebook. He needs those platforms for reach, and reach is necessary for his business model. 

I complied, but I was spooked. Are we really now in the position that talking about what happened to us is verboten on mainstream venues? Sadly, that seems to be where we headed. In big and small ways, and throughout the culture and the whole world, we are bit by bit being trained to forget and hence not learn and thus repeat the whole thing. 

This makes no sense since nearly every public issue in play today traces to those fateful days and the fallout thereof, including censorship, the entrenchment of industry-government oligarchs, the corruption of media and tech, the educational upheaval, the abuse of courts and law, and the developing financial and banking crisis. 

And yet hardly anyone wants to speak about the topic frankly. It is too upsetting. There is too much at stake. We cannot risk being canceled, the single greatest fear of every aspirational professional in today’s world. Plus too many powerful people were in on it and don’t want to admit it. It would appear that the whole subject is being memoryholed in ways of which they all approve. 

For nearly two years, or longer, respectable intellectuals knew not to dissent from the prevailing norms and challenge the whole machinery. This was true of Washington think tanks, which went on their merry way from March 2020 either celebrating the “public health response” or just remaining quiet. The same was true of the leadership of major political parties and third parties. 

Most religious leaders stayed quiet too, even as their doors were padlocked for as long as 2 holiday seasons. Civic organizations played along. If you thought that the job of the ACLU was to defend civil liberties, you were wrong: they one day decided that lockdowns, mandatory masks, and forced shots were essential to their mission. 

So many were compromised over 3 years. These same people now just want the whole subject to go away. We find ourselves in an odd position, having experienced the biggest trauma in our lives and in many generations and yet there is precious little open talk about it. Brownstone was established to fill this void but we’ve become a target as a result. 

The search engines have been gamed for the better part of 3 years to keep the science channeled in only one direction. If web platforms step out of line, it is easy enough for search engines and social-media companies to tag them as problematic and thus throttle their reach. But for Substackers – and they are being targeted now too – it would be hard to find out anything other than what the oligarchs want you to believe. 

This silent treatment is filtering down to every aspect of our lives and becoming entrenched in the political culture too. Here is an example from this week. 

When Donald Trump returned from his theatrical and ridiculous indictment on nothing in New York, he flew immediately back to Mar-a-Lago where he told his story to people gathered in a pastiche-baroque ballroom. He told of the fake news, the attempted impeachments for Russia and Ukraine, the plots and schemes, and onward to the fake ballots and the FBI raid on his home, and now this preposterous new thing. 

It was a solid narrative overall. But his story left out a hugely important detail. He said not one word about Covid lockdowns and Operation Warp Speed that was supposed to be the great fix for the virus but flopped. This was a rather important detail to leave out since it wrecked the economy, the Bill of Rights, education, and led to a massive demographic upheaval in addition to the continuing fallout in terms of culture, economics, and everything else. 

It also caused him to lose the presidency, whether because the shock resulted in mass demoralization (this was certainly not a path to making America great again) or because of the mail-in ballots made possible by Covid restrictions, or probably both. However you look at it, it was the most disastrous decision of his presidency or possibly any presidency in history. 

How in the world are we just supposed to pretend that this did not happen? And yet he is playing along simply because he does not want to admit error. He thinks it makes him appear weak. Nor does he still slam the successor presidency for mask and shot mandates even though hundreds of millions were affected by them. He would rather not bring up the topic at all, lest doing so raises questions about his own judgment in those fateful days of March 2020. 

Meanwhile, the DNC does not want to admit that it celebrated and built on Trump’s biggest disaster while the RNC does not want to discuss that the policies they decry from the DNC actually began under the RNC. And so you have a kind of “mutually assured destruction” pact between them that needs no plot or contract. In silencing all talk about this, each party is only doing what is in its interest. 

We can fully expect that these issues will be locked out of the campaign narratives in 2024 just as they were in 2020 and 2022. Everyone seems to agree: the less said the better. And this is precisely why the announced candidacy of Robert Kennedy, Jr., has triggered the usual and expected gaslighting from the mainstream media. The plan is to flog him into marginalization. And if that doesn’t work, they will flog and flog again. 

We are seeing a real-time example of how history is really written. The narrative is more self-serving than we knew. If all the power centers in society get something tremendously wrong, an informal conspiracy of silence develops around it, with the hope of just wiping it from the history books. 

As Michael Senger has written, “Lockdowns met little resistance in part because they reinforced existing power structures. The rich got richer, the Zoom class got a vacation, workers got stimulus, while some business owners, their employees, and the most vulnerable had to sacrifice everything for this fantasy.” 

And we can add to that: government gained vastly more power. In fact, Covid became the template for the biggest expansion of government power over the population in world history, more effective than ancient myths about god-like rulers, heresy trials and witch burnings of the Middle Ages, sedition purges of the 18th and 19th centuries, red scares of the 20th centuries, the Cold War, or even the wars on terror. Fear of infectious disease was more effective than all of them for ratcheting up despotism. 

When something works this well for the most powerful people in society, why not just keep quiet about it?

The tellers of tales can write stories but they cannot invent their own realities. There will be no restoration of liberty, rights, and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future. Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age. 

The Loss Of Free Speech Was Predictable And Preventable

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By Patrick Wood

Source: Technocracy News & Trends

As technology has disrupted key elements of society, Technocrats have taken advantage of the chaos to not only implement their own agenda but also to erect barriers to competition or resistance. If this had been recognized early enough, it could have been easily blocked. Now, the mere barriers have hardened into fortresses.⁃ TN Editor

The First Amendment is at a critical juncture. Recent congressional hearings on the Twitter Files brought the matter into full public view. Freedom of speech and of the press are hanging by a precarious thread. Do we want a future in which information flows freely, or one in which an information elite controls those flows “for our own good?” The choices we make over the next few years will determine which of those futures we get.

It’s tragic that we have let the problem reach this dangerous state. What heightens the tragedy, however, is that the war against America’s most cherished freedoms was predictable and preventable. If those of us who value freedom want to win, we’re going to need a strategy grounded in a clear understanding of what’s happening and why.

The Twitter Files story is shocking. Allegations that big tech and social media manipulate information have been around for as long as we’ve had tech and social media companies. Allegations of bias among the mainstream media are even older. In recent years, however, both the allegations and the supporting evidence have ratcheted upward to unprecedented levels.

When Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he opened his company’s internal archives to scrutiny. He assembled a team of journalists with a curious pedigree: registered Democrats with a distaste for Donald Trump and his supporters, whose track records skewed considerably left of center, and whose recent work has demonstrated deep concern about the politicization of journalism.

Musk gave them unfettered access. They found a deep, broad, and disturbing pattern of collaboration between big government and big tech designed to promote “official stories” on multiple issues, throttle competing theories and arguments, and sanction those who dared to question government propaganda.

When two of those journalists – Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger – testified before Congress, their Democratic inquisitors sought to belittle their credentials, question their motives, and tar them as part of some Republican-funded, far-right conspiracy. The still-left-leaning journalists are trying to absorb their shock at the depths to which the formerly civil-libertarian left has fallen.

Far from shocking, however, that fall was predictable – and predicted. In 2001, amidst the public disgust with tech companies following the collapse of the dotcom bubble, I set out to make sense of life during the transition from the late industrial age to the early information age. I analyzed what I called the first four front-page stories of the information age: the dotcom bubble, the Microsoft antitrust trial, the rise of open-source software, and the Napster-driven wars over digital music. Contrary to popular opinion of the time, I believed that these stories were far from distinct. I saw them as four manifestations of a single underlying phenomenon. My goal was to understand that phenomenon.

I found it. It appeared most clearly in the digital music arena, but it ran through all four stories – and through much that has happened since. It appears just as clearly in today’s war on free speech. It involves an entirely predictable pattern of opportunity, action, and reaction.

The starting point is digitization and quantification. The Internet changed the economics of information. Throughout human history, information was scarce, hard to acquire, and expensive to process. Skilled professionals – spies, scholars, lawyers, accountants, clerics, doctors – could command a premium for their knowledge. When the Internet went public, anything that could be digitized and quantified suddenly flowed freely. Information was there for the asking. The premium shifted to filtering – the ability to discard unwanted information and arrange what remained.

Economic shifts generate massive opportunities for creative, entrepreneurial people and bring glorious benefits to millions of consumers. The Internet was no exception in this regard, and neither was the predictable backlash against it. Anything that benefits new businesses and empowers consumers is a warning shot across the bow of powerful incumbents who’d grown accustomed to serving those consumers in a predictable, profitable, manner.

In the music industry, anything that let individual consumers share digital music files reduced the revenues, profits, power, and control of record labels. Pre-digitization, these powerful incumbents determined what music got recorded and how it was packaged, distributed, presented, and priced. It was a comfortable business model that gave us the music industry “as we knew it.” The Internet undermined it entirely.

Powerful incumbents never fade quietly into the night when challenged. They fight, using whatever weapons they can muster. In our society, the most effective ways to undermine new technological and economic opportunities tend to lie in law, regulation, and public policy. The record labels fought – largely successfully – to apply and reinterpret existing laws and to change laws in ways favorable to their interests.

There’s the pattern: Technology creates opportunities. New businesses exploit those opportunities. Consumers benefit. Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The new laws ensure that the next wave of technological change runs largely through the powerful incumbents, rather than against them.

By 2003, I had distilled this pattern, showed numerous ways that it had already unfolded, predicted that it would soon hit parts of our economy and our lives far more significant than the music industry, and suggested some ways that we might prepare ourselves for the coming battles.

It took another two years to get my analysis published. It went largely unnoticed. Twelve years later, then-Senator Ben Sasse described the ways that this pattern had forever disrupted the dynamics of employment. This, too, went largely unnoticed.

Today, we see that disruptive pattern threatening the most basic of our civil liberties. Its manifestation in the arenas of speech, propaganda, and censorship is clear. Consider how each step in the process I identified above has played out here:

Technology creates opportunities. The Internet opened entirely new vistas for the creation and exchange of ideas, information, theories, opinions, propaganda, and outright lies.

New businesses exploit those opportunities. The companies founded since 1995 that created and control the world’s most important conduits for information have joined the ranks of history’s most powerful entities.

Consumers benefit. The centrality of these communication systems to our lives (for better or for worse) proves that they confer real value.

Powerful incumbents fear their loss of control. The twin political shocks of 2016 – Brexit and Donald Trump – highlighted the extent to which official channels had lost control of the narrative. With the entirety of elite media, government, big business, and the intelligentsia aligned behind Remain and Hillary, the newly empowered masses understood – for the first time – that there were viable alternatives to the official story.

Threatened incumbents seek allies in government. A coalition of elite forces assembled quickly, laser-focused on stomping out the populist threat. Masses empowered to conduct their own analyses, draw their own conclusions, and share their opinions among themselves threatened the stability of the power structure “as we know it.”

Government changes laws and regulations to protect incumbent interests. Prior to Musk’s Twitter, the entirety of Silicon Valley committed itself to “protecting” the public from “disinformation,” roughly defined as anything that threatened to undermine an official, sanctioned narrative. Allies throughout the administrative state, Congress, and the Biden White House are working to embed those “protections” in law.

Media campaigns “educate” the public on the merits of the new policies. The same mainstream media that vilified Napster, Grokster, and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing is now working to turn public opinion against the evil purveyors of alleged “disinformation.”

Will the information age be an era of informed, empowered citizens – or an era of a dominant, information-controlling elite? Stay tuned. That’s the question we need to answer.