Category Archives: Psy-ops

Government to Facebook Pipeline Reveals a Corrupt Mix of Social Media and the State

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The next time someone tells you that “Facebook is a private company” ask them if they know about the dozens of government employees who fill its ranks.

By Matt Agorist

Source: The Free Thought Project

As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, the phrase “Facebook is a private company” is not accurate as they have formed a partnership with an insidious neoconservative “think tank” known as the Atlantic Council which is directly funded and made up of groups tied to the pharmaceutical industry, the military industrial complex, and even government itself. The Atlantic Council dictates to Facebook who is allowed on the platform and who is purged.

Because the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the United States government—and they are making decisions for Facebook—this negates the claim that the company is private. Since our six million followers and years of hard work were wiped off the platform during the October purge, TFTP has consistently reported on the Atlantic Council and their ties to the social media giant. This week, however, we’ve discovered something just as ominous—the government to Facebook pipeline and revolving door.

It is a telltale sign of a corrupt industry or company when they create a revolving door between themselves and the state. Just like Monsanto has former employees on the Supreme Court and Pharmaceutical industry insiders move back and fourth from the FDA to their companies, we found that Facebook is doing the same thing.

Below are just a few of corrupt connections we’ve discovered while digging through the list of current and former employees within Facebook.

Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy—aka, the man who doles out the ban hammer to anyone he wishes—is Nathaniel Gleicher. Before Gleicher was censoring people at Facebook, he prosecuted cybercrime at the U.S. Department of Justice, and served as Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the National Security Council (NSC) in the Obama White House.

While Facebook may have an interest in seeking out Gleicher’s expertise, this man is an outspoken advocate of tyranny.

After deleting the pages of hundreds of antiwar and pro-peace media and activist outlets in October, last month, Facebook made another giant move to silence. This time, they had no problem noting that they went after pages whose specific missions were “anti-corruption” or “protest” movements. And it was all headed up by Gleicher.

“Some of the Pages frequently posted about topics like anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements, and anti-corruption,” Gleicher wrote in a blog post. “We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.”

Seems totally legit, right?

The list goes on.

In 2017, as the Russian/Trump propaganda ramped up, Facebook hired Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant.

While filling team Zuck with Obama and Clinton advisers, Facebook hired Aneesh Raman, a former Obama speechwriter who now heads up Facebook’s “economic impact programming.”

Highlighting the revolving door aspect of Facebook and the US government is Sarah Feinberg who left the Obama train in 2011 to join Facebook as the director of corporate and strategic communications. She then moved on after and went back to Obama in 2015 to act as the administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).

David Recordon also highlights the revolving door between Facebook and the government. Recordon was the former Director of IT for Obama’s White House. He was also Engineering Director at Facebook prior to his role at the White House, and returned to the position after the 2016 election. He is currently Engineering Director for the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative.

Starting to see a pattern of political influence here? You should. But just in case you don’t, the list goes on.

Meredith Carden—who, you guessed, came from the Obama administration — joined the Facebook clan last year to be a part of Facebook’s “News Integrity Team.” Now, she’s battling fake news on the platform and as we’ve shown, there is a ridiculous amount of selective enforcement of these so-called “standards.”

In fact, there are dozens of former Obama staffers, advisers, and campaign associates who quite literally fill Facebook’s ranks. It is no wonder the platform has taken such a political shift over the past few years. David Ploufe, Josh W. Higgins, Lauryn Ogbechie, Danielle Cwirko-Godycki, Sarah Pollack, Ben Forer, Bonnie Calvin, and Juliane Sun, are just some of the many Facebook execs hailing out of the Obama era White House.

But fret not right wingers, Facebook likes their neocons too.

Jamie Fly, who was a top adviser to neocon Florida Senator Marco Rubio and who started his career in US political circles as an adviser to the George W. Bush administration, actually took credit for the massive purge of peaceful antiwar pages that took place last October.

“They can invent stories that get repeated and spread through different sites. So we are just starting to push back. Just this last week Facebook began starting to take down sites. So this is just the beginning,” Fly said in December.

Fly backs up his words with the fact that he works with Facebook’s arm of the Atlantic Council to ensure those dangerous antiwar folks don’t keep pushing their propaganda of peace and community.

And yes, this list goes on.

Joel David Kaplan is Facebook’s vice president of global public policy. Prior to his major role within Facebook, Kaplan took the place of neocon extraordinaire Karl Rove as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for George W. Bush. Before that, from 2001 to 2003 he was Special Assistant to the President for Policy within the White House Chief of Staff’s office. Then he served as Deputy Director of the Office of Management And Budget (OMB).

Myriah Jordan was a special policy assistant in the Bush White House, who was hired on as a policy manager for Facebook’s congressional relations team—aka, a lobbyist. Jordan has moved back and forth between the private sector and the US government multiple times over his career as he’s made millions greasing the skids of the state for his corrupt employers.

So there you have it. Facebook, who claims to be a private entity, is quite literally made up of and advised by dozens of members of government. We’re ready for a change, are you?

The Age of Tyrannical Surveillance: We’re Being Branded, Bought and Sold for Our Data

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about… Your digital identity will live forever… because there’s no delete button.”—Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Uncle Sam wants you.

Correction: Big Brother wants you.

To be technically accurate, Big Brother—aided and abetted by his corporate partners in crime—wants your data.

That’s what we have been reduced to in the eyes of the government and Corporate America: data bits and economic units to be bought, bartered and sold to the highest bidder.

Those highest bidders include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”

Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.

Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?

That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.

This is the age of surveillance capitalism.

Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.

Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.

“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.

No one is spared.

In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.

This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—makes the NSA’s surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.

What’s worse, this for-profit surveillance capitalism scheme is made possible with our cooperation.

All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.

Think about it.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.

On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.

If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.

Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.

It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.

The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.

Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.

Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.

We’ve made it so easy for the government to watch us.

Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

If you’re an activist and you simply like or share this article on Facebook or retweet it on Twitter, you’re most likely flagging yourself as a potential renegade, revolutionary or anti-government extremist—a.k.a. terrorist.

Yet whether or not you like or share this particular article, simply by reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties is enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities. The corporate state must watch and keep tabs on you if it is to keep you in line.

Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

The government has the know-how.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

It’s happening already in China.

Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have now been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.

Get ready, because all signs point to China serving as the role model for our dystopian future.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters.

Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare.

This is the kind of oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick.

Remember, even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

In the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.

This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

It turns out that we are Soylent Green.

The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

Oh, how right he was.

Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.

We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.

Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.

As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.

Indeed, George Orwell’s description of the world of 1984 is as apt a description of today’s world as I’ve ever seen: “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

8 VENEZUELA LIES THE US GOVERNMENT & MAINSTREAM MEDIA WANT YOU TO BELIEVE

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By Makia Freeman

Source: Waking Times

Venezuela lies abound. Both the USG (United States Government) and its lapdog MSM (Mainstream Media) have been going into overdrive, exaggerating or just plain lying about the state of affairs in Venezuela. Truth is always a casualty of war, and it’s also a casualty of pre-war, as the NWO prepares the ground for military intervention by demonization and propaganda. Here are 8 lies about Venezuela which are being used to justify yet another coup in a long, long history of US coups in foreign lands.

Venezuela Lies #1: The Venezuelan People Have No Food and the Shelves Are Bare

In these videos (here and here) on the ground in Caracas, Max Blumenthal exposed one of the lies about Venezuela that is constantly repeated, i.e. that the people have no food and the supermarket shelves are bare.

Venezuela Lies #2: The US Only Wants to Send Aid

If by “aid” you mean “weapons and barbed wire for radical opposition forces,” then yes, the US only wants to send aid. However, if by “aid” you mean actual medicine, then no. This VenezuelaAnalysis report quotes a NYT reporter and USAID itself. They either don’t have medicine as part of the inventory or state outright that there was no medicine:

“According to New York Times reporter Anatoly Kurmanaev, the trucks that the opposition tried to force across the border contained “no medicine” at all, with reports that a “small” amount of medicine was being stockpiled in Cucuta not confirmed by USAID. Initial inventories from USAID made no mention of medicine, listing only basic food and personal hygiene products amongst the “aid”.”

The Venezuelan Government is accepting aid from Russia and other countries it can trust, just not the US, since US “aid” may just “accidentally” happen to contain weapons for anti-Maduro agitators (or, as the Spanish say, compradores). Hmm, wonder how those arms got in the food truck?

As I covered in the article NGOs: Choice Tool of Subversion for the New World Order, NGOs have become a weaponized tool of soft power through which the NWO expands its empire – meddling, destabilizing, toppling and installing, all the while using the NGO as a humanitarian pretext. USAID is just another in a long-line of NGOs loyal to the US Government and NWO, willing to put a nice PR happy face on their agenda of subversion.

Venezuela Lies #3: Juan Guaido Has Legitimacy in Declaring Himself President

As I covered in my previous article Is This the Most Blatant US Coup Ever?, Juan Guaido is a US-CIA stooge through and through. He’s an agent-provocateur “opposition leader” who has been carefully groomed to play his role in the coup. His claim to be interim president of Venezuela under Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution is, legally, utter nonsense, since Maduro has not abandoned the presidency and Maduro held free, open and fair elections as adjudged by outside independent parties.

Venezuela Lies #4: Many Countries Support Guaido

The US claims many nations and groups support its efforts to topple Maduro and install Guaido. In reality, these countries are basically vassal states or other nations controlled by the US that don’t want to upset the apple cart. Notice the strategy of the US: try to co-opt the United Nations HRC (Human Right Council) into following US coup efforts, and try to strong-arm groups like the OAS (Organization of American States) and the Lima Group into betraying their brother nation Venezuela.

The US tried this same trick with the Syrian War by creating and controlling a group called “Friends of Syria.” Here is what Venezuela’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador Jorge Valero said:

“the self-proclaimed “Lima Group” is a cartel made up of satellite governments of the imperial government to break Latin American and Caribbean unity, and, due to the failure of using the Ministry of the Colonies, which is the OAS to isolate Venezuela in this organization. The empire and its minions couldn’t approve Article 20 of Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Permanent Council of the OAS and resort to the United Nations Security Council, where they also failed. The creation of puppet governments by the US is not new.”

Venezuela Lies #5: The US Cares about the Venezuelan People (Just Like It Cares about the Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian and Iranian People)

The NWO uses the US to bring all nations into its fold, but it like to do so with the veneer of democracy so as to gain more public support and engender less resistance. Subversion, NGO soft power and covert operations are more palatable than overt control and boot-in-the-face oppression. In this vein, the USG likes to pretend it truly cares and has deep compassion for the people of nations like Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and any other place it plans to subvert, invade or bomb … even though it has never professed such care in the past and will probably never again profess it in the future once its new puppet leader is installed.

Just look at the kind of lies, hypocrisy and nonsense Pence and a “deeply concerned” Pompeo tweeted about Iran when the USG set it sights on igniting a coup there in 2018:

Venezuela Lies #6: Venezuela is Only in the Condition It is Because of Chavez, Maduro and Socialism (They’re the Bad Guys)

Nothing is black and white. It is possible to look at the unfolding Venezuelan crisis and acknowledge that Maduro has mismanaged things while at the same time seeing the gross foreign interference he and his government have been subjected to. As I covered in other articles such as Venezuelan Economic Crisis: The Real Cause is Not Socialism, US-NWO foreign meddling is by far the biggest factor here. For instance, did you know that Bank of England has effectively stolen USD$1.2 billion from Venezuela by toeing the NWO line and blocking Venezuela from accessing it? Did you know that the US has effectively stolen USD$11 billion from Venezuela by freezing its US accounts? How is a small nation supposed to function as normal when such massive amounts are stolen from it?

Venezuela Lies #7: Yes, the US Has Toppled Governments Worldwide, But “This Time It’s Different”

Once you study enough history, you begin to see the lies of tyrants and empires. The lie remains the same. The US wants Venezuela’s gold and mineral reserves. It’s only 5 days from the US, whereas the Middle East is around 20 days from the US and in a very volatile part of the world. There is also the strategic acquisition of the mineral coltan. They also want to teach the successive government to Hugo Chavez a lesson after he thumbed his nose at the US-NWO Empire. This isn’t any different from other subversions and invasions. It fits the pattern exactly.

Venezuela Lies #8: It’s a “Grassroots Uprising” against a “Brutal Dictator”

This entire coup has been planned, orchestrated and executed from Washington. Period. There is no “grassroots uprising.” Ever wondered why Assad and Maduro are “brutal dictators” but bin Salman, El Sisi and other US-CIA stooges are not? It’s all about branding the enemy, marketing foreign interference and controlling perception. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa. Al-Qaeda is bad and now Al-Qaeda is good. Were we fighting Eastasia or was it Eurasia?

Who is the brutal dictator? Who is imposing economic warfare and deprivation, starvation and misery by sanction? Who is fomenting regime change on innocent nations? Who is funding and supporting terrorists to topple any government they don’t like?

Final Thoughts: The US vs. Russia/China Proxy War Continues

Both Russia and China have invested a lot in Venezuela, including actual investments in their oil, military assistance and financial loans. They are not about to let the US get away with this – even if Venezuela is in the USA’s backyard, geographically speaking. The Monroe Doctrine, which started out in the 1800s as a policy by which the US would protect fellow American nations from European invasion, has now been turned on its head. Raving warmonger John Bolton recently mentioned the term as yet another excuse for the US to dominate whomever it wants on the 2 American continents. However, despite all the Venezuela lies emanating from Washington DC and the MSM, Venezuela is going to be a tough nut to crack, and many American and Westerners are already aware of the propaganda being used to foment war.

Facebook Wants You to Know if You’re Getting Your News From the Wrong Government

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By Jim Naureckas

Source: FAIR

There’s a famous polling experiment that asked people in the Cold War-era US:

Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?

When this question was posed on its own, only 36 percent of respondents said yes. But a separate sample was first asked:

Do you think a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it?

When the questions were asked together—reminding people that restrictions on press freedom could be placed on their own country’s journalists, as well as on those of an official enemy—support for allowing access to Communist reporters doubled to 73 percent. (Ninety percent said that US reporters should be allowed to report freely from Russia—suggesting that only a relatively narrow slice of the population openly subscribed to the principle of free speech for me but not for thee.)

I thought of this experiment when Rania Khalek (who’s written for FAIR) told me that the viral video company she works for, In the Now, was taken off Facebook because of its indirect connection to the Russian government. (A majority stake in In the Now’s parent company, Maffick Media, is owned by a subsidiary of RT—a Moscow-based media group that, although organized as a private entity, is funded by the Russian government.)

Facebook suspended the page of In the Now, along with three other pages run by Maffick—the current affairs channel Soapbox, the environment-oriented Waste-Ed and the history-focused BackThen—after the social media giant was asked about the RT-connected pages by CNN. CNN (2/18/19), in turn, reported it was tipped off to the In the Now/RT connection by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a group based at US government–funded German Marshall Fund.

In the Now is back on Facebook again—after a ten-day suspension—and returned with this rather user-unfriendly description:

In the Now is a brand of Maffick which is owned and operated by Anissa Naouai and Ruptly GmbH, a subsidiary of RT.

That’s not particularly helpful if you want to know what In the Now does, of course, but disclosure is good, right? For the goose but not the gander, apparently: Among the US-funded institutions with Facebook pages are, well, the German Marshall Fund. Its description just reads, “Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation.” Will that page be taken down until the Fund acknowledges where its money comes from?

How about the PBS NewsHour, also funded by the US government? No mention of that on Facebook: Just, “On air and online, the PBS NewsHour provides in-depth analysis of the issues that matter to you.”

NPR’s Facebook page seems to go out of its way to conceal the fact that it’s US government–supported, calling itself “a privately supported, not-for-profit membership organization.” Maybe the P stands for “Private”?

Even straightforward propaganda outlets of the US government don’t have to identify themselves as such on Facebook. Take Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, set up at the height of the Cold War to broadcast the US government’s version of reality behind the Iron Curtain—and still going strong almost 70 years later. Its “About” on Facebook reads:

Uncensored news. Responsible and open debate. Specialized coverage of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Caucasus, Iran, Balkans, South Asia, Eastern Europe.

For those who go the extra mile and click on “See More” under “Who We Are,” you do get this misleading semi-acknowledgement:

RFE/RL is registered with the IRS as a private, nonprofit Sec. 501(c)3 corporation, and is funded by a grant from the US Congress through the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) as a private grantee. RFE/RL‘s editorial independence is protected by US law.

Yes, RFE/RL is organized as a private entity—just like RT is. But just as the head of RT is also the head of the Russian state international news agency, the head of RFE/RL is appointed by the head of the USAGM—a government official picked by the president. That’s a funny kind of “independence.”

The Facebook page of Voice of America, the US government’s main broadcast outlet, is even squirrelier. There doesn’t seem to be any acknowledgement at all that VoA is connected to the US government—just the slogan, “The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth”; the claim that it has “the world’s most interesting stories”; and information on how you can “have the best of VoA News delivered directly to your inbox each day.”

If you’re thinking that Facebook—90 percent of whose customers are not in the United States—should treat Russian-backed outlets differently than US-backed outlets because the US supports peace and democracy, or doesn’t use social media to try to manipulate other nations…. Well, this is why it’s important to get your information from a variety of sources.

But it’s not just US outlets that get to conceal their government funding on Facebook. The BBC doesn’t mention that it’s controlled and funded by the British government—only that its “mission is to enrich your life. To inform, educate and entertain.”

At Al Jazeera English’s Facebook page, you learn, “We are the voice of the voiceless”—not that they are owned by the monarchy of Qatar.

Facebook needs to have one rule for whether government-funded outlets need to disclose their connections. And it needs to apply that rule consistently.

 

Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia Merger: Global Empire of Dystopia?

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By Gilbert Mercier

Source: News Junkie Post

The nature of reality in times of universal confusion

The world and our interpretation of it are often at best an idea and, at worse, a figment of our imagination. In our full-blown Orwellian construct, the truths of some are the fake news of others. Invisible forces and undisclosed interests rule the world and its so-called leaders, who are mostly actor-puppets directed from scripted narratives. They largely live in an alternate universe where, if you repeat outlandish lies often and loudly enough, the disinformation becomes the unquestionable reality for countless people. Reality has become stranger than fiction because the conflicting narratives about what is supposed to be real are, by and large, fictional. They are cleverly crafted propaganda that manipulate by maximizing confusion. The masters of this craft have gutted familiar words of all meaning.

For example, at the heart of Oceania, the white-orange clown emperor, obsessed with walls to protect his subjects from southern brown invaders, told his adoring patrons and sycophants, “we renew our resolve that Oceania shall never be socialist!” The aging patricians gathered for the obligatory annual feast gave him a standing ovation, and loudly chanted “Oceania, Oceania, Oceania!…” This enthusiastic chanting from Oceania’s Patricians, except for the more dignified Supreme Elders and Commanders of the Praetorian Guard, repeated itself on cue at least four of five times, to celebrate the great universal superiority of the invincible mighty empire of the free and the brave! The egotistical emperor’s writers must have laughed as he served up their outstanding fictions to the empire’s docile subjects!

Schopenhauer’s relevant pessimism

In his essential book, The World as Will and Idea, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) contested the rationalist notion that reason alone gave humans the universal key to an infinitely complex, and often irrational, reality. He took the assessments Immanuel Kant had made in his Critique of Pure Reason a step further by adding the fundamental notion of sufficient reason. This was a less absolute concept of the relation of cause to effect, which he anchored in what he deemed to be four categories of human knowledge: science, morality, logic, and metaphysics. Schopenhauer’s work was in part a reaction to the overly optimistic vision of the rationalists, with Rene Descartes in the lead.

In his inherent pessimism, Schopenhauer turned out to be more realistic about the limitations of humans to grasp, not only the full elusive scope of reality, but also their own frailty and insignificance as a self. In these gloomy times of uncertainty and of a general dumbing-down effect in our impoverished global culture, Schopenhauer’s work helps to explain why most aspects of our existence, including our relationship with nature, are beyond most people’s comprehension. For most humans, the absolute reality is an extremely fragmented knowledge filtered through the prism of their perceptions.

Global empire of dystopia?

In other words, whether one lives in Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia, the definitions of reality and information have been tailored in these different places to different needs, but almost all the narratives fulfill opaque agendas whose main objectives are to keep people on edge and in despair. The brainwashing from most media makes nearly everybody thoroughly dazed and confused. The goal is to break the will of populations and beat their souls into submission. For this to work, dissent must be eradicated. Let’s face it, if we stay on course, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia could soon merge into the global Empire of Dystopia where 2+2=5. For example, Oceania claims that, with its satellite-vassals, the empire defeated ISIS, which it had worked to create, although it is the leader of sovereign Syria (with the help of Eurasia and the former empire of Persia) who defeated both Oceania and ISIS after seven years of war.

From one manufactured crisis to another, always in what my esteemed colleague Dady Chery calls “other people’s countries,” the mad circus goes on and on like a merry-go-round. And it works, so long as the big lies are salted with a little truth for seasoning. As world citizens, we are tasked with dismantling this monstrous global Orwellian Empire of many faces that is tightening its grip everywhere.

Empires of the past and present, which are in flux, have always extended their powers through satellite provinces and spheres of influence. Empires dislike dissent from within, as well as nearby states that are eager to stay independent and sovereign. During the simpler times of the Cold War when the United States and USSR tried to divide the world in two, some independently minded head of states, such as Tito, Nasser and Castro, refused to submit to this bipolarity and initiated the nonaligned movement. This notion must be urgently revisited, for the sake of the little that is left of smaller nations’ sovereignty.

Of course, Orwell’s cartography of the three entities of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia no longer reflects the geopolitical reality, but his principle of mass indoctrination is at play on a global scale. The narratives appear to be in conflict, but the nitty-gritty mechanics below the radar are similar. Under the surface, and despite the veneers of ideological or religious clashes, a global scheme of wealth and power concentration has been unleashed. Worldwide, the super-rich, and the corporate entities they control, are getting richer while the middle-class is vanishing and the poor are becoming enslaved. Merciless capitalism is the true god of the Orwellian Empire’s three subdivisions. Capitalism demands daily sacrifices of sweat, tears and blood. The system’s blatant contradictions do not trouble its ruling class. On one hand, pseudo nationalist-populists are the servants of a supra-national corporatism, and on the other, the so-called liberals and neoliberals can, on short notice, adopt the worst methods of authoritarian repression.

Two examples of this are unfolding that serve as valuable case studies. First, there is Oceania’s effort to grab a critical piece of what it views as its birthright continent. This is, of course, Venezuela. Secondly, in La Macronie, an eastern asset of Oceania that used to be an empire in its own right, there is the intent to create an authoritarian neoliberal regime with a metrosexual humanitarian touch, to curtail widespread popular protests.

Venezuela: Revolution is imperialism

Oceania has in its crosshair the sovereign state of Venezuela, founded by Simon Bolivar. All empires have precepts or doctrines that conveniently serve to expand their territories and influence by various means, including military invasions, organization of coups and, lately, severe economic sanctions to engineer failed states that become ripe for orchestrated revolutions. The nervous system of Oceania, in Washington DC, views Venezuela as a natural appendage, based on one of the oldest formative tenets of the empire: the Monroe Doctrine, concocted in 1823. It came about using the seemingly altruistic but false notion that the newly independent countries of Central and South America had to be protected from their old colonial masters. In time, it became a claim to all the Americas as the United States’ domain and backyard.

To topple the legitimately elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, whom Washington does not like, the empire is again trying to manufacture a revolution led by someone it handpicked and groomed. The name of the man who currently aspires to be Oceania’s Governor in Venezuela hardly matters. Through the years, the strategy of fake revolution following economic sanctions has had mixed results: it failed in Iran in 2009; it worked against Qaddafi in Libya, combined with a small military intervention; it partially worked in Ukraine until Eurasia stepped in; it failed entirely in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad remains in power. With Venezuela’s military still firmly on his side, this strategy is unlikely to work with the heir of Hugo Chavez.

So far the aggression against Venezuela has served as a thorough head count of Oceania’s vassals and enemies. In the Americas, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay have defied the with-or-against-us litmus test. The rest, including Canada, have aligned themselves with the imperial diktat that Maduro must go. It is the same with most of the European imperial colonies of Oceania, except for Italy and Greece. This is a clear demonstration that the leaders of most states in the European Union lack a foreign policy independent from Oceania and operate largely as governors for Oceania rather than heads of state.

Indeed, according to Mr. Temir Porras, who has worked as Nicolas Maduro’s chief-of-staff and a foreign-policy advisor to Hugo Chavez, the position of most EU countries in supporting Guaido reeks of “neocolonialist interference.” The eight-day “ultimatum to hold presidential elections before recognizing Juan Guaido is a schizophrenic and incomprehensible position.” Porras elaborates that it is “absurd to say that Juan Guaido represents a consensus with Maduro’s opposition in Venezuela,” and that Guaido from the far-right populist party, Voluntad Popular, was almost unknown in Venezuela two weeks ago.

On the opposite side, to go back to Orwell’s cartography lexicon, those that claim so far that “Maduro must stay,” besides the four Latin American countries named above, involve an interesting alliance of Eurasia, Eastasia, and the former Persian and Ottoman empires.

Gilets Jaunes: rays of sunshine on a bleak horizon

Meanwhile, in La Macronie, a beautiful land with a soil rich in its bounty of bread, wine and revolution, a real revolution is brewing from the streets. A little light flickers at the end of the tunnel of our gloomy path, it is like countless little rays of sunshine that try to brighten our dark days, it is the Gilets Jaunes movement. The little governor for Oceania, an arrogant and imperious man who might have liked to be king in a parallel universe, is trying to stop the flow of a tempestuous Gilets Jaunes river with rubber-bullet guns, riot-police shields, and repressive legislation. The disparity between his actions and his almost humanitarian discourse have lost him all credibility. In La Macronie, the governor, by curtailing the freedom to protest and freedom of the press, is testing a brand new form of oppression. It is a young elegant authoritarian regime, with a smile, that caters to the global elite of murderous capitalism. This is an important test, and many worldwide are counting on the Gilets Jaunes to prevail.

 

Editor’s Notes: Gilbert Mercier is the author of The Orwellian Empire. Photographs one, five, six, seven and eight from the archives of Jakob Reimann; two from the archive of Wackystuff; three from the archive of Philip Pacemaker; four by Daryn Moffitt; nine by Nicholas J. Potter; ten and eleven by Joka Madruga; and fourteen by Urban Nauth.

Israel Lobby Rebuts Omar’s Claims About Its Immense Influence By Exerting Its Immense Influence

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In response to criticisms made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar that US political leaders have too much allegiance to Israel and its lobbying groups, House Democrats have put forward an entire House resolution in accordance with demands made by AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League.

“The backlash [over Omar’s comments] continued on Monday, as the Anti-Defamation League wrote a letter to Pelosi calling for a House resolution to specifically reject what the organization calls Omar’s ‘latest slur,’” Politico reports. “‘We urge you and your colleagues to send the unambiguous message that the United States Congress is no place for hate,’ the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a letter.”

“The charge of dual loyalty not only raises the ominous specter of classic anti-Semitism, but it is also deeply insulting to the millions upon millions of patriotic Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who stand by our democratic ally, Israel,” tweeted the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Friday in response to Omar’s comments.

“I hope @AIPAC isn’t too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they’re told to condemn their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that’s what caused the delay,” snarked journalist Glenn Greenwald in response to the news of the House resolution.

US politicians of all faiths and in both parties have indeed been falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell the freshman congresswoman that she is wrong and evil for suggesting that there is undue loyalty to Israel among US politicians.

“It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community,” tweeted California Congressman Juan Vargas, who is not Jewish. “Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable,” Vargas continued, inadvertently re-stating Omar’s original argument.

“But serious question: How is it anti-Semitic to question Christian Republican allegiance to Israel?” asked journalist Rania Khalek in response to the controversy. “Because it’s people like Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Marco Rubio who Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were initially called anti-Semitic for challenging on loyalty to Israel.”

It is indeed interesting that the label “antisemitism” is being pinned on an argument directed at mostly non-Jewish lawmakers and not at Jews at all. It is also interesting that the House resolution’s current text twists that reality on its head by falsely implying that the comments were directed at Jewish politicians. The most Omar-specific parts of the resolution read as follows:

Whereas the definition further includes ‘‘accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’’;

Whereas the myth of dual loyalty, including allegations that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens, has been used to marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries for being a stateless minority;

Whereas accusing Jews of dual loyalty because they support Israel, whether out of a religious connection, a commitment to Jewish self-determination after millennia of persecution, or an appreciation for shared values and interests, suggests that Jews cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors, when Jews have served our Nation since its founding, whether in public life or military service;

Whereas accusations of dual loyalty generally have an insidious, bigoted history, including (1) the discriminatory internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II on the basis of race; (2) the Dreyfuss affair; when Alfred Dreyfuss, a Jewish French artillery captain was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background; (3) when the loyalty of President John F. Kennedy was questioned because of his Catholic faith; and (4) the post-9/11 conditions faced by Muslim-Americans in the United States, including unfounded, vicious attacks on and threats to Muslim-American Members of Congress;

Omar’s comments have nothing to do with Jews, Judaism or Jewishness, but with the geopolitical entanglements between the US and a nation which currently serves as an outpost for US military agendas in the Middle East. It’s a basic, unassailable fact that the agenda to maintain this relationship holds immense sway in America’s capitol, which is why the only arguments you see against it are fallacious, dishonest, irrelevant, or even prove it to be true.

“It is so disingenuous of some of these members of Congress who are lining up to condemn these questioning voices as if they have no campaign finance interest in the outcome,” former congressman Brian Baird told the New York Times today. “If one dares to criticize Israel or dares to criticize AIPAC, one gets branded anti-Semitic, and that’s a danger to a democratic republic.”

Ilhan Omar has sparked one of the most interesting conversations happening in America today, and the smear campaign against her has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism, but with silencing that conversation. The social engineers are not interested in fighting religious bigotry, they are interested in shutting her up.

In an increasingly neoliberalism-weary world, the old smear tactics of labeling a dissident voice a “communist” or a “socialist” don’t pack the kind of punching power they used to, so new ones are needed. The propagandists have been field testing them for a while now, and whenever a successful prototype rolls off the conveyor belt you quickly see it shipped around the world. Smears of Kremlin servitude found purchase in the US, and it wasn’t long before we saw the BBC posing an image of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against the backdrop of the Kremlin wearing what was made to resemble a Soviet-era hat. Antisemitism smears found purchase against Corbyn in the UK, and it wasn’t long before we saw those same smear tactics used across the pond against Ilhan Omar. If an imperial smear field tests well in our new political climate, you can be certain you’ll see it used elsewhere within the empire before long.

https://twitter.com/PrettyBadLefty/status/1102748288309231618

This bogus concern trolling about antisemitism has always been about smearing, and the smearing has always been about narrative control. If they can manipulate the public into distrusting someone who voices a dissenting narrative, they can keep that dissenting narrative from entering the bloodstream of mainstream consciousness. The need to keep a nuclear-armed branch of the US-centralized empire in the heart of the most crucial strategic location on earth is too important for our rulers to allow its fate to be left in the hands of the democratic process, so they control the narrative about it with extreme aggression and smear anyone who questions it. That’s all this has ever been.

How To Tell If Someone Is Controlled Opposition

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Every day in my article comments and social media I get people warning me that this or that journalist, activist or politician is “controlled opposition”, meaning someone who pretends to oppose the establishment while covertly serving it. These warnings usually come after I’ve shared or written about something a dissident figure has said or done, and are usually accompanied by an admonishment not to ever do so again lest I spread their malign influence. If you’ve been involved in any kind of anti-establishment activism for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered this yourself.

Paranoia pervades dissident circles of all sorts, and it’s not entirely without merit, since establishment infiltration of political movements is the norm, not the exception. This article by Truthout documents multiple instances in which movements like the 1968 Chicago DNC protest and Peter Camejo’s 1976 anti-establishment presidential campaign were so heavily infiltrated by opaque government agencies that one out of every six people involved in them were secretly working for the feds. This trend of infiltration is known to have continued into the current day with movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and we’d be ignorant not to assume that this has been at least as rampant in online circles where people organize and disseminate ideas and information.

So it’s understandable that people are extremely vigilant about prominent figures in dissident circles, and it’s understandable that people feel paranoid. Over and over again we see shining anti-establishment movements fizzle or rendered impotent, often seemingly with the help of people we once trusted, and it’s hard not to get frustrated and become suspicious of anyone who starts shining bright in antiwar, leftist, or other dissident circles.

The trouble with this paranoia and suspicion is that it doesn’t seem to function with any kind of intelligence. I have received such “controlled opposition” warnings about pretty much every prominent dissident figure in the English-speaking world at one time or another, and if I believed them all there’d be no one in the world whose words I could share or write about, including my own. I myself have been accused at different times of being a “plant” for the CIA, the Russians, Assad, the Chinese Communist Party, the Iranian mullahs, the alt-right, Trump, Pyongyang, and the Palestinians, which if all true would make me a very busy girl indeed. Since I know I’m not a plant for anybody, I know for myself that such accusations don’t come from a place of insight with any degree of reliability, and I’ve therefore had to find my own way to navigate this confusing landscape.

So since I know that infiltration and manipulation happens, but I don’t find other people’s whisperings about “controlled opposition” useful, how do I figure out who’s trustworthy and who isn’t? How do I figure out who it’s safe to cite in my work and who to avoid? How do I separate the fool’s gold from the genuine article? The shit from the Shinola?

Here is my answer: I don’t.

I spend no mental energy whatsoever concerning myself with who may or may not be a secret pro-establishment influencer, and for good reason. There’s no way to know for sure if an individual is secretly scheming to sheep dog the populace into support for the status quo, and as long as government agencies remain opaque and unaccountable there will never be a way to know who might be secretly working for them. What I can know is (A) what I’ve learned about the world, (B) the ways the political/media class is lying about what I know about the world, and (C) when someone says something which highlights those lies. I therefore pay attention solely to the message, and no attention to what may or may not be the hidden underlying agenda of the messenger.

In other words, if someone says something which disrupts establishment narratives, I help elevate what they’re saying in that specific instance. I do this not because I know that the speaker is legit and uncorrupted, but because their message in that moment is worthy of elevation. You can navigate the entire political/media landscape in this way.

Since society is made of narrative and power ultimately rests in the hands of those who are able to control those narratives, it makes no sense to fixate on individuals and it makes perfect sense to focus on narrative. What narratives are being pushed by those in power? How are those narratives being disrupted, undermined and debunked by things that are being said by dissident voices? This is the most effective lens through which to view the battle against the unelected power establishment which is crushing us all to death, not some childish fixation on who should or shouldn’t be our hero.

Have no heroes. Trust nobody but your own inner sense-maker. If someone says something that disrupts establishment narratives based on what you understand those narratives to be, go ahead and help throw what they’re saying into the gears of the machine. Don’t make a religion out of it, don’t get attached to it, just use it as a weapon to attack the narrative matrix.

This by the way is also a useful lens to look through in spiritual development, if you’re into that sort of thing. When you enter spiritual circles concerned with enlightenment, you’ll see all sorts of debates about what teachers are really enlightened and which ones are just pretending, and these conversations mimic precisely the exact kinds of debates you’ll see in marginalized political circles about who’s the real deal and who’s controlled opposition. But the truth is there’s no way to know with certainty what’s going on in someone else’s head, and the best thing to do is to stop concerning yourself with who has and has not attained some special realization or whatever and just focus on what they’re saying. If a spiritual teacher says something which helps you notice something you’d never noticed before about consciousness or perception, then use what they said and maybe stick around to see if they have anything else useful to say. If not, move on.

There’s no reason to worry about what journalists, activists and politicians are coming from a place of authenticity if you know yourself to be coming from a place of authenticity. As you learn more about the world and get better at distinguishing fact from narrative, you will get better and better at seeing the narrative matrix clearly, and you’ll come to see all the things that are being said about what’s going on in the world as weapons in the battle of narrative control. Pick up whatever weapons seem useful to you and use them in whatever ways they’ll be useful, without wasting energy concerning yourself with the individuals who created them. Call the bullshit what it is and use the truth for what it is.

Or maybe I’m fulla shit! Maybe I myself am being paid to say these things by some powerful influencer; you can’t know for sure. All you can know is what’s useful for you. If you really find it useful to try and organize individual dissident figures into “hero” and “controlled opposition” boxes, if that genuinely helps you take apart the system that’s hurting us all, you’d know that better than I would. But if you find what I’m saying here useful, pick it up and add it to your toolbox.

Death of Free Speech leads to Fascism

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By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

Freedom of speech is rather important. If people do not feel free to express their thoughts, then all they can do is endlessly repeat what has been said before, creating an echo chamber which no new understandings can ever penetrate. What they repeat may have been a tissue of lies from the outset, or it may have been true or relevant once, but will become outdated and, essentially, as good as a lie.

Lies beget ignorance. Ignorance begets fear. Fear begets hatred. And hatred begets violence. The ability to speak our minds and to listen to others—even those who are said to be our enemies—is what separates us from wild beasts. Deprive us of this right, and sure as rain we degenerate into subhumans who claw at the ground, howl at the moon and gnaw on raw human flesh… or something like that.

The practice of free speech is quite a demanding art. Just being able to make intelligible sounds with your mouth or to poke at a keyboard in a way that pleases the spell-checker makes you no more an expert practitioner of free speech than does the ability to get up from your chair and walk to the bathroom make you a ballet dancer. Free speech encompasses the expression of fact and opinion. Facts cannot be fake, or you can stand accused of libel or of spreading disinformation. Opinion cannot be incendiary, or you can stand accused of undermining public order.

To be on the safe side, free speech should not contain performatives—speech acts that seek to alter the state of the world. Calls to action, unsolicited advice, coercion, intimidation, threats, personal categorizations and the like can all reasonably be banned without hurting the exercise of free speech at all. Demagoguery—attempts to manipulate public sentiment by exploiting popular desires, fears and prejudices—is rather unhelpful, although to some extent unavoidable. Some forms of free speech should be rightfully privileged over the rest: the literary arts (both fiction and nonfiction), cinematography, music, visual and performance arts are at the top; political slogans shouted over swine-toned music at an audience of sloppy drunks are definitely near the bottom.

The quality of society is directly proportional to the quality of its exercise of free speech, and to assure high quality some form of quality control is usually called for. Governments often have to backstop this need by legislating against certain forms of speech. The older standard against incendiary speech or speech that may cause a panic—shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater—is justified as a matter of public safety. Newer standards against hate speech and discrimination are on shakier ground. They are essentially gag orders that drive the exercise of certain forms of speech underground, thereby making it harder to regulate and more dangerous. The expectation that banning “hate speech” will prevent hatred is unrealistic; nor is the expectation that haters can be compelled to do their hating in silence. Likewise, banning discriminatory speech can only suppress overt expressions of discrimination but not the behavior itself, making it more intractable, since nothing short of a lobotomy can prevent people from discriminating against those they find disagreeable.

Aside from government-provided backstops (which are blunt, inaccurate instruments) most of what provides for high-quality free speech is self-control and, to the extent that it is needed, self-censorship. Essentially, every negative form of free speech—disinformation, libel, demagoguery, manipulation, incendiary rhetoric, etc.—reduce the level of respect and trust between the speaker and the audience. Taken to an extreme, the concept of free speech itself becomes superfluous as everybody manifests their ignorance while spouting their worthless opinions without bothering to listen to anyone else—because everyone else is equally ignorant and their opinions are equally worthless and meaningless. The only thing that can prevent this backslide into worthlessness and meaninglessness is high standards of social adequacy.

But how can such high standards persist in a world of trolls and bots, of concocted false narratives endlessly blasted out at full volume, where a thought that is significantly longer than a tweet simply cannot be expressed? How can they be enforced if the modern value system requires tolerance, nondiscrimination and inclusiveness toward all—including the most miserable miscreants—lowering the price of admission to public discourse to zero? Surprisingly, it can, and it does persist: some writers find their readers and some performers find their audiences—somehow. Their numbers aren’t huge, but then, since quality is almost always inversely proportional to quantity, their small numbers don’t matter that much.

In fact, these numbers are so small that to ascribe any sort of significant agency to those who pay attention, or to those to whom they pay attention. The proper and essential function of free speech is not to somehow remake the world in one’s own image (you should consider yourself lucky if you can bring about a change in yourself, never mind make a difference in your own family or neighborhood). Its function is to keep you sane and grounded and to prevent you from cascading down through lies, ignorance, fear, hatred and violence, eventually degenerating into wild beasts who claw at the ground, howl at the moon and chew on each other…

The concocted false narratives endlessly blasted out at full volume make such work difficult. The narratives that are designed to generate a misplaced sense of agency are perhaps the most difficult veil to shred. No matter how many times I try to explain that the US is not a democracy and that it doesn’t matter who is president, these facts seem to just bounce off people’s heads. When I try to explain certain facts about technology—for instance, that wind and solar power unfortunately just don’t work and that the countries that pursue them are setting themselves up for economic disaster, but that for all of its dangers nuclear power does seem to have a very important future (although only in certain countries)—in response people demand to know whether or not I am “in favor” of nuclear power.

What a ridiculous question! That’s like you asking your flush toilet what it thinks of sewage treatment or your office chair whether it is in favor of a sedentary lifestyle. Just like the office chair and the toilet you and I, with respect to nuclear power, are not subjects but objects. If you are reading this, then you are willy-nilly in favor of nuclear power, because if the nuclear reactors were off your screen would be blank and you’d be sitting in the dark with the heat or the air conditioning not working. But that’s a false choice—simply because it isn’t on offer—any more than an office chair or a toilet can decide whether it wishes to be sat on or not.

And now there is another development that is making the exercise of free speech even more difficult: the phenomenon of “deplatforming.” Various companies, including Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, Patreon and various others, have taken it upon themselves to become arbiters of free speech and interpreters of the First Amendment. Their conceit is that their user base forms a “community” upon which they are entitled to impose “community standards.” In fact, they are privately owned for-profit companies and their clients are individuals or other companies, not communities. They may try to argue that they are publishers of some sort, and publishers are entitled to maintaining an editorial policy, but there is an unbridgeable gap between the editorial process and just typing some text and clicking “publish.” In fact, what they are attempting to do is perhaps best described as vigilante censorship. The most that they are entitled to do is refer their users for prosecution if there is reason to believe that their users have violated specific laws.

I became aware of this new “deplatforming” menace a couple of months ago, when some of my readers started abandoning Patreon after it deplatformed certain people. Prior to that my readership on Patreon had been growing nicely, but then the growth stalled. I’ll never know—and don’t really care—what was behind these decisions, since I don’t see them as legitimate. Typical parting comments from my readers were:

“You crossed the line with censorship and I cannot support this company.”

“I believe in freedom of speech. Censorship is not a virtue. Shame on you.”

“Patreon should not be a moral arbiter. You are supposed to be a payment platform.”

“This site cannot be trusted to support free speech.”

In short, Patreon’s censorship, which it disingenuously called “community standards,” was costing me money, and so I complained:

“Your editorial policy is costing me money. Since Patreon is just a paywalled blogging platform I don’t understand why you should have an editorial policy at all. If you find that your clients are violating state or federal laws you should refer them for prosecution; if not, I honestly do not understand what gives you the reason or the right, or the legal competence, to act as interpreters of the First Amendment.”

The answer I got back was rather terse: “…we do not disclose any details surrounding creator page removals…” First, that isn’t an answer to my question. Second, it shows a remarkable degree of contempt for any sort of fairness. Secret tribunals that result in “removals,” that are based on vague, private, arbitrary rules, that refuse to disclose the basis of their decisions, that cause financial losses but refuse acknowledge them or to compensate for them… doesn’t that sound just a tiny bit fascist?

And so I set up a SubscribeStar account where I publish all the same materials as on Patreon, and to which my readers have been gradually migrating. SubscribeStar is not quite as feature-rich as Patreon (yet) and it has been banned by PayPal (not a big loss; my readers seem to hate PayPal) but it does have the advantage of being honest: it is simply a blogging platform integrated with a paywall.

Meanwhile, the “deplatforming” has only grown worse. Most recently, CNN aired a public denunciation of RT (which it accused of being Russian), and based on this denunciation Facebook saw it fit to ban RT from Soapbox, Waste-Ed, Backthen as well shut down a personal project “In The Now” by the American journalist Anissa Naouai (because she works for RT). These were projects with millions of subscribers and billions of views. CNN’s denunciation was phrased as follows: these projects influence America’s young people! The bloody Russians are at it again, contaminating “our precious bodily fluids”!

None of this has anything at all to do with Russia, or the Russian government, or Putin personally. RT is government-financed, but so is BBC (which, it has now been admitted, lied about the fake chemical attacks in Syria’s Douma, causing Trump to unleash a volley of cruise missiles on Syria, most of which, luckily, the Syrians managed to shoot down). But while the British may lie as they wish (and provoke war crimes as a result) the Russians aren’t allowed to say anything at all—because they are Russian.

To understand the rationale behind this bout of Russophobia, it is important to understand that it has nothing to do with “containing Russia” or anything of the sort (that project has already failed). Instead, Russophobia neatly serves the internal political needs of the US and other Western countries. Two trends—the gradual suppression of free speech and the gradual dehumanization of Russians—go hand in hand. Free speech can be suppressed because of “Russian trolls” and election results can be manually rearranged as needed because of “Russian meddling.”

What makes such measures necessary? The West is experiencing an entire series of crises that is beginning to form the classical pattern defined by Lenin as the revolutionary situation: the elites can no longer rule as before while their subjects can no longer live as before. Western establishment (primarily its Deep State component) is forced to confront this problem. How can it preserve its power and maintain control, all without changing course or even swapping out it deeply unpopular public-facing figureheads? It has decided to deal with this crisis by suppressing the public will. Since such suppression is incompatible with maintaining the fiction of democratic governance, democracy has got to go. That’s where the Russians come in handy: if the voters don’t vote as programmed, then an entire election can be annulled because of “Russian meddling.” “Russian trolls” and Russian “fake news” are helpful too: they offer an excuse for suppressing free speech.

Having a phantom enemy is very helpful. First, there is nothing like the fear of an external enemy to force people to rally around their ruling elites. Second, since the enemy is a phantom, there is no danger of defeat in an actual war. But there is another danger: in the process of vilifying this phantom enemy, Russians as an ethnos are being progressively dehumanized. And the problem is that dehumanizing the enemy always results in degeneracy—not of the enemy, but of the dehumanizers themselves. Inevitably, it is the dehumanizers who end up running around on all fours, howling at the moon and having each other for dinner. Lies engender ignorance; ignorance engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence. At some point a horrific crime against Russians will take place, which will baptize both the Western elites and their Untermenschen in Russian blood, tying them together with bonds of criminal complicity. (This scenario has already been tested out in Eastern Ukraine.)

Before our eyes the most reactionary and the most chauvinistic and homicidal parts of Western financial elites are transforming Western “democracy” into a model terrorist dictatorship. But it is very hard to see what they could possibly hope to achieve other than the physical destruction of their own populations—if that can be considered an achievement. Perhaps their actual achievement will be in being able to carry out this destruction without having their own populations even notice that it is happening, lost as they are in a world of delusions fashioned out of false narratives endlessly blasted at them at high volume. We should feel lucky that a few voices are still able to pierce through the Bedlam, although we don’t know for how much longer. In the meantime, take a look around. This is what fascism looks like.