Tag Archives: censorship

Virus of Mass Destruction

Posted on by
1

Medical personnel arrive to perform COVID-19 coronavirus infection testing procedures at Glen Island Park, Friday, March 13, 2020, in New Rochelle, N.Y. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory, Inc.

There comes a point in the introduction of every new official narrative when people no longer remember how it started. Or, rather, they remember how it started, but not the propaganda that started it. Or, rather, they remember all that (or are able to, if you press them on it), but it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because the official narrative has supplanted reality.

You’ll remember this point from the War on Terror, and specifically the occupation of Iraq. By the latter half of 2004, most Westerners had completely forgotten the propaganda that launched the invasion, and thus regarded the Iraqi resistance as “terrorists,” despite the fact that the United States had invaded and was occupying their country for no legitimate reason whatsoever. By that time, it was abundantly clear that there were no “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the U.S.A. had invaded a nation that had not attacked it, and posed no threat to it, and so was perpetrating a textbook war of aggression.

These facts did not matter, not in the slightest. By that time, Westerners were totally immersed in the official War on Terror narrative, which had superseded objective reality. Herd mentality had taken over. It’s difficult to describe how this works; it’s a state of functional dissociation. It wasn’t that people didn’t know the facts, or that they didn’t understand the facts. They knew the Iraqis weren’t “terrorists.” At the same time, they knew they were definitely “terrorists,” despite the fact that they knew that they weren’t. They knew there were no WMDs, that there had never been any WMDs, and still they were certain there were WMDs, which would be found, although they clearly did not exist.

The same thing happened in Nazi Germany. The majority of the German people were never fanatical anti-Semites like the hardcore N.S.D.A.P. members. If they had been, there would have been no need for Goebbels and his monstrous propaganda machine. No, the Germans during the Nazi period, like the Americans during the War on Terror, knew that their victims posed no threat to them, and at the same time they believed exactly the opposite, and thus did not protest as their neighbors were hauled out of their homes and sent off to death camps, camps which, in their dissociative state, simultaneously did and did not exist.

What I’m describing probably sounds like psychosis, but, technically speaking, it isn’t … not quite. It is not an absolute break from reality. People functioning in this state know that what they believe is not real. Nonetheless, they are forced to believe it (and do, actually, literally, believe it, as impossible as I know that sounds), because the consequences of not believing it are even more frightening than the cognitive dissonance of believing a narrative they know is a fiction. Disbelieving the official narrative means excommunication from “normality,” the loss of friends, income, status, and in many cases far worse punishments. Herd animals, in a state of panic, instinctively run towards the center of the herd. Separation from the herd makes them easy prey for pursuing predators. It is the same primal instinct operating here.

It is the goal of every official narrative to generate this type of herd mentality, not in order to deceive or dupe the public, but, rather, to confuse and terrorize them to the point where they revert to their primal instincts, and are being driven purely by existential fear, and facts and truth no longer matter. Once an official narrative reaches this point, it is unassailable by facts and reason. It no longer needs facts to justify it. It justifies itself with its own existence. Reason cannot penetrate it. Arguing with its adherents is pointless. They know it is irrational. They simply do not care.

We are reaching this point with the coronavirus narrative. It is possible that we have already reached it. Despite the fact that what we are dealing with is a virus that, yes, is clearly deadly to the old and those with medical conditions, but that is just as clearly not a deadly threat to the majority of the human species, people are cowering inside their homes as if the Zombie Apocalpyse had finally begun. Many appear to believe that this virus is some sort of Alien-Terrorist Death Flu (or weaponized Virus of Mass Destruction) that will kill you the second you breathe it in.

This is not surprising at all, because, according to the official narrative, its destructive powers are nearly unlimited. Not only will it obliterate your lungs, and liquidate all your other major organs, and kill you with blood clots, and intestinal damage, now it causes “sudden strokes in young adults,” and possibly spontaneous prostate cancer, and God knows what other medical horrors!

According to all the “scientists” and “medical experts” (i.e., those that conform to the official narrative, not all the other scientists and medical experts), it is unlike any other virus that has ever existed in the history of viruses. It certainly doesn’t follow the typical pattern of spreading extensively for a limited period, and then rapidly dying down on its own, regardless of what measures are taken to thwart it, as this Israeli study would seem to indicate.

Also, “we have no immunity against it,” which is why we all have to remain “locked down” like unruly inmates in a penitentiary until a vaccine can be concocted and forced onto every living person on earth. Apparently, this mandatory wonder vaccine will magically render us immune to this virus against which we have no immunity (and are totally unable to develop immunity), which immunity will be certified on our mandatory “immunity papers,” which we will need to travel, get a job, send our kids to school, and, you know, to show the police when they stop us on the street because we look like maybe we might be “infected.”

Germany (where I live) is way out in front of this. According to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the federal government plans to introduce a coronavirus “immunity card” as part of its “Infection Protection Law,” which will grant the authorities the power to round up anyone “suspected to be contagious” and force them into … uh … “quarantine,” and “forbid them from entering certain public places.” The Malaysian authorities have dispensed with such niceties, and are arresting migrant workers and refugees in so-called “Covid-19 red zones” and marching them off to God knows where.

Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot … the germ and chemical warfare researchers at DARPA (i.e., the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed some new type of fancy blood test that will identify “asymptomatic carriers” (i.e., people who display no symptoms whatsoever). So that will probably come in handy … especially if the “white supremacists,” “Red-Brown extremists,” and “conspiracy theorists” keep protesting the lockdown with their wives and kids!

And these are just the latest additions to a list of rather dystopian examples of the “brave new normal” official narrative that GloboCap is rolling out, right before our very eyes (which the OffGuardian editors have streamlined here and here, and which continues on Twitter). It’s all right there in black and white. They aren’t hiding the totalitarianism … they don’t have to. Because people are begging for it. They are demanding to be “locked down” inside their homes, forced to wear masks, and stand two meters apart, for reasons that most of them no longer remember.

Plastic barriers are going up everywhere. Arrows on the floor show you which way to walk. Boxes show you where to stand. Paranoid Blockwarts are putting up signs threatening anyone not wearing a mask. Hysterical little fascist creeps are reporting their neighbors to the police for letting their children play with other children. Millions of people are voluntarily downloading “contact tracing applications” so that governments and global corporations can monitor their every movement. In Spain, they bleached an entire beach, killing everything, down to the insects, in order to protect the public from “infection.” The Internet has become an Orwellian chorus of shrieking, sanctimonious voices bullying everyone into conformity with charts, graphs, and desperate guilt-trips, few of which have much connection to reality. Corporations and governments are censoring dissent. We’re approaching a level of manufactured mass hysteria and herd mentality that not even Goebbels could have imagined.

Meanwhile, they’re striking the mostly empty “field hospitals,” and the theatrical “hospital ship” is now gone, and despite their attempts to inflate the Covid-19 death count as much as humanly possible, the projected hundreds of millions of deaths have not materialized (not even close), and Sweden is fine, as is most of humanity, and … just like there were no WMDs, there is no Virus of Mass Destruction.

What there is, is a new official narrative, the brave new, paranoid, pathologized “normal.” Like the War on Terror, it’s a global narrative. A global, post-ideological narrative. It’s just getting started, so it isn’t yet clear how totalitarian this show will get, but, given the nature of the pilot episode, I am kind of dreading the rest of the series.

Technofascism: Digital Book Burning in a Totalitarian Age

Posted on by
1

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”—Nat Hentoff

We are fast becoming a nation—nay, a world—of book burners.

While on paper, we are technically free to speak—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—in reality, however, we are only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow.

That’s not a whole lot of freedom. Especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.

Take David Icke, for example.

Icke, a popular commentator and author often labeled a conspiracy theorist by his detractors, recently had his Facebook page and YouTube channel (owned by Google) deleted for violating site policies by “spreading coronavirus disinformation.”

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which has been vocal about calling for Icke’s de-platforming, is also pushing for the removal of all other sites and individuals who promote Icke’s content in an effort to supposedly “save lives.”

Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.

This is the goosestepping Nanny State trying to protect us from ourselves.

In the long run, this “safety” control (the censorship and shadowbanning of anyone who challenges a mainstream narrative) will be far worse than merely allowing people to think for themselves.

Journalist Matt Taibbi gets its: “The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda.

These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns about COVID-19, a virus whose source and behavior continue to elude medical officials. They’re laying the groundwork now, with Icke as an easy target, to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

This is how freedom dies.

It doesn’t matter what disinformation Icke may or may not have been spreading about COVID-19. That’s not the issue.

As commentator Caitlin Johnstone recognizes, the censorship of David Icke by these internet media giants has nothing to do with Icke: “What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory.”

Welcome to the age of technofascism.

Technofascism, clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem. As journalist Chet Bowers explains, “Technofascism’s level of efficiency and totalitarian potential can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent.”

The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind: is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of hat will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We’re almost at that point now.

What you are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Today, the forces of political correctness, working in conjunction with corporate and government agencies, have managed to replace actual book burning with intellectual book burning.

“Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

This is about much more than free speech, however. This is about repression and control.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.

Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

The end result is control.

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 lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.

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 and infantilism.

It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing: this is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

Tread cautiously: Orwell’s 1984, which depicts the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism, has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

In fact, our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. And privacy and bodily integrity have been utterly eviscerated.

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot.

The government requires an accomplice.

Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide.

The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control.

There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price?

“We the people,” of course. Not just we Americans, but people the world over.

We have entered into a global state of tyranny.

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). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace not only watched but is controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—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—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial “needle in a haystack,” as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. This data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint.

When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.

Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any “threatening” words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has designed an artificial intelligence system that can anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA feeds vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer then uses to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents.

Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves 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.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.

So how do you survive this global surveillance state?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re running out of options.

We’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.

Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”

Which brings me back to this technofascist tyranny being meted out on David Icke and all those like him who dare to voice ideas that diverge from what the government and its corporate controllers deem to be acceptable.

The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.

The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

In this way, we have become our worst enemy.

You want to reclaim some of the ground we’re fast losing to the techno-tyrants?

Start by thinking for yourself. If that means reading the “dangerous” ideas being floated out there by the David Ickes of the world—or the John Whiteheads for that matter—and then deciding for yourself what is true, so be it.

As Orwell concluded, “Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four.”

Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

Posted on by
1

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

Why are some respected alt-media embracing a police state?

Posted on by
1

By Catte Black

Source: Off-Guardian.org

It should be obvious by now to anyone that the covid19 pandemic, whatever its origins, is being used to fast forward a “new normal” world of unparalleled government power, surveillance and curtailment of individual liberty.

We are looking already at:

  • Compulsory DNRs for some elderly.
  • Biometric chips or bracelets to monitor whether or not you have permission to be outside your home or engage in work
  • Drone surveillance as normal.
  • Apps on your phone that can detect any breach of the self-isolation policy.
  • Huge new police powers of arrest and detention for anyone suspected of carrying the virus.
  • Suspension of elections for indefinite periods at government discretion

And this is only the starter course. We can be pretty sure they are currently just easing us in. The real stuff will be rolling along in the next months or maybe years (depending on how quickly they feel able to get this on)

This is the fabric of nightmare. A worst-case horror story that is the absolute quintessence of everything the alt-media is supposed to oppose.

Surely, you would think, any self-respecting alt-media person would be opposing this with everything they have while they still have a voice.

Well, some of us are of course. And we’re going to be posting links to other sites currently doing great work challenging this rollout.

But, weeks into this crisis, there are some very prominent voices still refusing to either question the official narrative of the pandemic or unequivocally condemn the fast dawn of the “new normal” Brave New World.

We’ve held off from confronting this for a while now. We figured people needed time to adjust or wake up to the reality of what was happening. It’s shocking after all, and deeply disorienting, and different individuals need different amounts of time to get their bearings when something that shakes their worldview comes along.

But adjustment time is long over by now.

Let’s also be clear, we’re not condemning people for simply disagreeing with us. We expect disagreement on some issues. It’s a source of strength for all of us.

But this is not about relatively minor differences of opinion or interpretation.

This is sophisticated analysts, with resources and experience, failing to condemn, and even supporting, what amounts to de facto international martial law.

This is Labour activists who mere weeks ago were calling Boris Johnson a murderer and psychopath, now cheering as he is handed total control of their lives and their children’s lives.

This is respected journalists, commentators and academics who loudly condemned the cynical lies about WMDs or ‘chemical attacks’ in Douma, the fake videos and fake White Helmets, suddenly and uncritically accepting the veracity of every government virus narrative, every unsourced video and media meme that has #covid19 as a hashtag.

This is people who have campaigned against the Patriot Act for 19 years, signing off on the new US anti-covid19 legislation without a murmur; who know that governments always abuse their powers, thinking they somehow just won’t abuse these.

This is people who know about Guantanamo and who have seen Julian Assange humiliated and abused, somehow thinking the people who did these things won’t use the new post-covid police state to do them even more.

This is something more than simple denial. It’s – what?

Are they simply paralysed with fear, either of the hyped-up virus, or the scary dystopia we are all suddenly inhabiting? Is it Stockholm Syndrome? Is it still possible some of them will wake up or unfreeze and see what is going on?

Are some of them gatekeepers, sleeper assets being activated in this extreme situation specifically to divert and delude the questioning and sceptical people who tend to follow them?

Well, I guess we can’t completely rule that out, can we, though I wouldn’t want to make that claim about anyone.

Are some just being self-serving and shallow, playing at being dissident while the price was low enough? Did they think writing a popular alt media blog was an easy way to be cool, but never had any intention of standing by any of it once it got a bit risky to do so?

I mean you are not gonna get that coveted slot on RT or Buzzfeed by taking on this major ‘new normal’ narrative are you? So that’s a factor potentially.

You can see the appeal of just sitting on the fence and talking in vague terms about how this fascism malarkey is a bit worrying, but stopping short of actually condemning it. That way you keep the option open to be ‘radical’ again once it looks safe enough to do so, but also don’t risk your comfy and lucrative relationship with the Establishment Left, who are all eagerly embracing the new age of mass incarceration and really want you to do the same.

Are some, as has been unkindly suggested, just too stupid to see what’s going on? Do epidemiology stats hurt their brains? Does thinking too much take up valuable psychobabble time? Is it hard to see the black clouds of tyranny rolling in when your head is too firmly planted in your own delightfully quirky posterior?

Or – we have to ask this – are a number of them simply, well, fascists? Do they actually support tyrannical top-down authoritarianism? Has their beef with the PTB merely been that they themselves are not currently high enough up that hierarchy? And do they see the covid19 rollout as some sort of revolution that will launch them and their chums into the positions of sweet supremacy they always knew they deserved?

Easy to preach permanent lockdown and biometric implant slavery when you figure none of it will apply to you and your family, I suppose.

All of these potential explanations may be the answer in some cases. And there could be a hundred other reasons besides.

But, in the end, do the explanations really matter? Do they change anything? Excuse anything?

The fact is these people stood at the barricades cheering and rallying the masses until the tanks could be seen rolling down the street – when they promptly upped and went over to join them.

Is there anything else to be said about that?

And where do we go from here?

THEY ARE ROLLING OUT THE ARCHITECTURE OF OPPRESSION NOW BECAUSE THEY FEAR THE PEOPLE

Posted on by
Reply

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a recent interview. “Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what is being built is the architecture of oppression.”

“Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19,” reads a new report from Bloomberg. “People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”

“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine. However, civil liberties experts warn that the public has little recourse to challenge these digital exercises of power once the immediate threat has passed,” reads a recent VentureBeat article titled “After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal“.

https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange/status/1248470867538931712

“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions,” reads a recent article by Politico, adding, “But the prospect of compiling a national database of potentially sensitive health information has prompted concerns about its impact on civil liberties well after the coronavirus threat recedes, with some critics comparing it to the Patriot Act enacted after the 9/11 attacks.”

“Mass surveillance methods could save lives around the world, permitting authorities to track and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus with speed and accuracy not possible during prior pandemics,” The Intercept‘s Sam Biddle wrote last week, adding, “There’s a glaring problem: We’ve heard all this before. After the September 11 attacks, Americans were told that greater monitoring and data sharing would allow the state to stop terrorism before it started, leading Congress to grant unprecedented surveillance powers that often failed to preempt much of anything. The persistence and expansion of this spying in the nearly two decades since, and the abuses exposed by Snowden and others, remind us that emergency powers can outlive their emergencies.”

As we discussed recently, it’s an established fact that power structures will seize upon opportunities to roll out oppressive authoritarian agendas under the pretense of protecting ordinary people, when in reality they’d been working on advancing those agendas since long before the crisis being offered as the reason for them. It happened with 9/11, and we may be certain that it is happening now.

The reason for this is simple: the powerful are afraid of the public. They always have been. For as long as there has been government power, there has been the fear that the people will realize the power of their numbers and overthrow the government that is in power. And understandably so; it has happened many times throughout history.

This is more the case now than ever. The oppressive, exploitative nature of neoliberalism has created a dissatisfaction that’s converged with humanity’s historically unprecedented ability to network and share information, which has seen anti-government protests and movements arising all around the world. Despite the longstanding media blackout on the Yellow Vests protests in France, you may be absolutely certain that eyes widened and leaders snapped to attention all around the planet when the words “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” were scrawled in graffiti on the Arc de Triomphe during the early days of the demonstrations.

Leaders are made vastly more fearful and skittish by the fact that this dissatisfaction with the current world order just happens to be occurring at a time when that world order is already at its most tenuous point in decades, with a surging China poised to surpass the US as a superpower on the world stage and collaborating with Russia and other unabsorbed nations to create a truly multipolar world. It becomes much more difficult to control dominant narratives in a way that can effectively manufacture consent for the aggression that will be necessary to freeze and reverse this shift away from unipolar domination when the denizens of that unipolar empire are out in the streets demanding its downfall.

And so of course internet censorship is being ramped up as well, with the mass media demanding that plutocrat-owned tech companies do more to combat coronavirus “disinformation” and these government-allied tech giants all too happy to oblige. In a recent escalation in this ongoing trend, Youtube changed its rules and began deleting videos accordingly after David Icke said there is a connection between coronavirus and 5G in a controversial video on that platform. Youtube is owned by Google, which has been a military-intelligence contractor with ties to the CIA and NSA since its very inception; you don’t have to like Icke or his views to be repulsed by the idea of this institution manipulating human communication with an increasingly iron fist.

The escalations in internet censorship and the escalations in surveillance are both directed at a last-ditch effort to control the masses before control is lost forever, and neither are intended to be rolled back when the threat of the virus is over. People are now off the streets, with their communications being restricted and the devices they carry in their pockets being monitored with more and more intrusiveness. There are of course some good faith actors who legitimately want to protect people from the virus, just as there were some good faith actors who wanted to protect people from terrorism after 9/11, but where there is power and fear of the public there will be an agenda to reel in the freedom of the masses.

Journalist Jonathan Cook said it best when he wrote, “Our leaders are terrified. Not of the virus – of us.”

Assange Rips the Matrix

Posted on by
Reply

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Information Clearing House

The persecution of Julian Assange is one of those breakthrough moments when suddenly people realise that almost everything they have been told to believe is not true.

This week the Australian-born journalist and publisher has been subjected to a show trial in a British court with the threat of extradition to the United States looming. If he is extradited, the 48-year old is facing 175 years – a death sentence – in prison on wholly contrived espionage charges.

Assange is being persecuted for the sole and simple reason that he exposed war crimes and systematic corruption by the US government and its Western allies. His years of arbitrary detention and the torture endured over the past year while in solitary confinement in a British dungeon are a grim warning to all citizens. The warning is that their supposed democratic rights are non-existent as far as the powers in Washington and London are concerned. If you dare speak truth to power, then this fate will also be yours.

Thus, when it gets down to it, the harsh reality is that there is no such thing as democracy in the US or Britain. Elections and media are but window-dressing to hide the brutal truth that fundamental, basic democratic rights of free speech and due legal process are not inalienable principles, but rather are dispensable privileges whenever the powers-that-be ordain so.

Julian Assange’s incarceration and pillorying is like an inquisition from medieval times happening in the year 2020. He dared expose the rampant, systematic crimes of so-called authorities through his Wikileaks site. His blasphemy was to expose the charlatans and mass-killers who masquerade as pious leaders.

Those revelations showed the public that the pretensions of democracy and rule of law by the American and British governments are nothing but hypocritical, empty posturing. Assange’s courageous publishing work demonstrated how those governments have waged criminal wars and committed genocidal crimes; how they have made a mockery of international law and democratic rights. And for that heroic service to public truth and empowerment with the truth, Assange is being pilloried like a rebellious serf by overlords posing as “governments” and “judges”.

Assange’s show trial is also powerfully revealing of the real nature of Western so-called news media. Not one of the major US or British news outlets have given any coverage, let alone comment, regarding his week-long extradition trial.

A journalist and publisher is being whipsawed in the court as if he is a dangerous terrorist. He is denied elementary due process by being confined to a glass-cage dock, not able to communicate with his defence lawyers, unable to even hear what his accusers are claiming.

His extradition, to be determined at a future court hearing, seems like a foregone conclusion, such is the bias and hostility towards Assange from the presiding British judge, Vanessa Baraitser.

Given the international outcry from hundreds of doctors and UN representatives over Assange’s torture endured while in British custody, and given the grotesque abuse of legal process by the American and British so-called authorities, the case should be thrown out immediately – if there were any modicum of justice.

The vendetta against Assange tells us what kind of societies citizens (or rather subjects) are living under in the US and Britain. These states are oligarchies where “democratic rights” are strictly conditional on subjects not stepping out of line, such as criticising war crimes or illegal global spying.

Julian Assange has torn through the largely invisible matrix of propaganda and power that people really live under. The saccharin myths of “democracy” and “free speech” are shown for the ugly, putrid reality that they are. And the Western corporate-controlled media in their silence about what is going on are also condemned for the lying servile machines that they are.

We must not accept the fate being prepared for Assange as if it is inevitable or as if we are powerless to overthrow it. The first step towards freedom is truth, and thanks to Julian Assange, we have the power to be free. We know the tyrannical nature of the governments that presume to rule over us in our names. There must be a popular uprising in defence of Assange. Because no-one is free until he is.

A final note by way of testimony: anyone who has been enlightened by Wikileaks’ revelations over the past decade will know that the current escalation of conflict in Syria’s Idlib is due to NATO powers illegally occupying that country. They will know that NATO powers have for years covertly sponsored terror groups to carry out a criminal regime-change war. By contrast, anyone who relies on Western governments and mainstream media for “information” will have no idea whatsoever about what is really going in Syria. A wider war could erupt any day and those who are brainwashed by Western regimes and their media are impotent to stop it. The empowerment of citizens by Julian Assange and Wikileaks over the years is the difference between ending wars or fueling them.

The vendetta against Assange tells us what kind of societies citizens (or rather subjects) are living under in the US and Britain. These states are oligarchies where “democratic rights” are strictly conditional on subjects not stepping out of line, such as criticising war crimes or illegal global spying.

Julian Assange has torn through the largely invisible matrix of propaganda and power that people really live under. The saccharin myths of “democracy” and “free speech” are shown for the ugly, putrid reality that they are. And the Western corporate-controlled media in their silence about what is going on are also condemned for the lying servile machines that they are.

We must not accept the fate being prepared for Assange as if it is inevitable or as if we are powerless to overthrow it. The first step towards freedom is truth, and thanks to Julian Assange, we have the power to be free. We know the tyrannical nature of the governments that presume to rule over us in our names. There must be a popular uprising in defence of Assange. Because no-one is free until he is.

A final note by way of testimony: anyone who has been enlightened by Wikileaks’ revelations over the past decade will know that the current escalation of conflict in Syria’s Idlib is due to NATO powers illegally occupying that country. They will know that NATO powers have for years covertly sponsored terror groups to carry out a criminal regime-change war. By contrast, anyone who relies on Western governments and mainstream media for “information” will have no idea whatsoever about what is really going in Syria. A wider war could erupt any day and those who are brainwashed by Western regimes and their media are impotent to stop it. The empowerment of citizens by Julian Assange and Wikileaks over the years is the difference between ending wars or fueling them.

Censorship Is the Way that Any Dictatorship — and NO Democracy — Functions

Posted on by
Reply

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

No democracy can survive censorship. If there is censorship, then each individual cannot make his/her own decisions (voting decisions or otherwise) on the basis of truth but only on the basis of whatever passes through the censor’s filter, which is always whatever supports the censoring regime and implants it evermore deeply into the public’s mind — regardless of its actual truthfulness.

The public does have a mind, as a collective constituting the majority of the residents in the given land, which majority rules any democratic government. If the government doesn’t really represent the majority, it’s no democracy, at all, but instead represents other individuals, the real rulers, who might be hidden. Consequently, if a democracy exists but a censor somehow becomes allowed, and emerges into existence in a given land, then democracy will inevitably be snuffed-out there, and dictatorship will inevitably be the result — merely because censorship has been applied there, which blocks some essential truths (truths that the rulers don’t want the public to know) from reaching the public.

Nothing is as toxic to democracy as is censorship. Censorship prevents democracy.

If a dictatorship already exists in a given land, then it does so by means of censorship, because only by that means will the public be willing to pay taxes to the regime and to go to war for it and to kill and die for it. Without censorship, none of that could happen, except in an authentic democracy. An authentic democracy has no censorship.

This is why democracy is so rare. Almost every dictatorship calls itself a ‘democracy’. But a government which calls itself “democratic” isn’t necessarily democratic, but more likely it has simply fooled its public to think that it is one (such as the United States has by now been scientifically proven to be — an actual dictatorship).

Anyone who endorses censorship is a totalitarian, a supporter of totalitarianism, even without recognizing the fact. If the person fails to recognize the fact that censorship is applied only in a totalitarian regime, then that person has bought into the most basic belief of totalitarianism: the idea that censorship can be justified in some circumstances. Dictatorships always pump that lie, so as to be able to continue to exist as a dictatorship. There is no circumstance which ever can justify censorship, unless one believes that dictatorship is, or can be, good instead of bad.

If you think that some censorship is good, then you have bought into the fundamental belief that is promulgated in any dictatorship. It’s a lie, but it fools the majority of people, in a dictatorship.

No writing, nor any other statement, should ever be censored, no matter how vile it is. Indeed, if it is vile, then it needs to be exposed, not hidden; because, if it is hidden, then it will fester until it grows in the dark and finally becomes sprung upon a public who have never been inoculated against it by truth, and therefore the false belief becomes actually seriously dangerous and likely to spread like wildfire, because it had been censored before it became public. The most deadly infections are those that grow in the dark and then become released upon a population who have no pre-existing protection against it.

Every religion, and every evil regime, seeks to censor-out whatever contradicts its propaganda, and is therefore intrinsically hostile toward democracy, but the danger is always being presented not by the writers and speakers of the propaganda, but by its publishers (regardless of media: print, broadcast, or online) — they are the source of all censorship. They are the censors. The people who select what to publish, and what not to publish, are the censors. The regime’s media are what perpetrate censorship, routinely, because those media are actually essential arms of the dictatorship, even if they are not directly owned by the government but instead by the clique who actually possess control over the government because they possess control over the mainstream (and much of the non-mainstream) media and thus the public’s mind in a ‘democracy’ in order to make it the dictatorship that it actually is.

Much has been written about how this censorship has been perpetrated in the post-WW-II (post-26-July-1945) USA., such as here, and here, and here, and here. (All of that has been censored-out from the major media — they don’t report that they represent the regime instead of the public.) As a consequence of that censorship against truth, history is being revised to be ‘history’ so as to portray a false ‘reality’ to people today. And there are numerous other examples of this, by the U.S. regime, each instance, of which lying, is affirmed as being truth by the regime’s agents, but is actually nothing more than vicious lies that are spread by the regime and its agents. What goes on behind the scenes is hidden from the American public, not really in order to protect them, but purely in order to deceive them. The deception of the American people, and of the residents in all of the U.S. Government’s foreign vassal-states (or ‘allies’) in Europe and elsewhere, is extreme, in all fields of international relations. Whereas Julian Assange was the world’s strongest enemy against censorship, he has been almost ten years now under some form or another of imprisonment, including solitary confinement and torture, all without ever having been convicted of anything, and all because he is an enemy against censorship instead of a flak for censorship. And Twitter and other ‘social media’ are hiding from the public — censoring — the sheer outrageousness of it all.

The solution to the problem of lies is not censorship, it is banning censorship. On 7 June 2019, the need for this seemed even clearer to me after Russia’s RT headlined on that date “Glenn Greenwald rips liberals who ‘beg for censorship’”, and that brilliant lawyer and investigative journalist presented powerfully the case against any censorship at all. As one can see from the accompanying video interview there of him, Greenwald was like a force of nature, in that video, or (to use a different metaphor) a huge dose of mental draino for clogged minds.

This also means that issues of libel and slander are only to be addressed in the civil courts, and not, at all, in the government’s prosecutions, the criminal courts.

All censorship needs to be banned. The question therefore becomes: How can this be done? That’s a question I have never seen discussed, perhaps because it is being censored. It’s a very serious question. Any ‘political science’ which exists that has no extensive literature about this question is fake. Perhaps draino for clogged minds is needed especially for scholars.

Things are worse than we know, because censorship exists. Maybe censorship is pervasive.

So: I shall venture a solution to this problem: By law, all media which discuss national and/or international affairs will fire all editors and producers of “news,” but not the employees who have only managerial, presentational, and/or stylistic assignments, and replace these people (all personnel who select what to present and what not to present) by a randomized algorithm being applied to each topic, so that, if, for example, something is entered into a search-box, then the order or presentation of the findings will be listed either (at the user’s selection) from earliest-posted to latest-posted, or latest-posted to earliest-posted, but not by anything that is chosen or determined by the search-engine itself. (In other words: no search-engine will be allowed to censor.) On print or broadcast media, every news-piece will be controlled in real time by its audience so as to determine what the questions are and then to bring into the presentation randomly selected scientifically qualified experts regarding each such question. For example: on the question of climate-change, the experts would be individuals who have terminal graduate-level degrees in each of the related climatology sub-specialties, such as those listed at Wikipedia, but also in essential related fields such as economics (an important climatological sub-specialty that’s not listed there). If, indeed, over 90% of climatologists agree that man-made global warming is a reality, then the result of this method of selecting the “experts” who will be presented is that that viewpoint will be represented by over 90% of the experts — and this outcome would not be controlled by the given ‘news’-medium, nor affected by its advertisers. In other words: only the subject-matter and academic qualifications — no governmental positions or background — would qualify individuals as being “experts” on the given topic. If a terminal degree isn’t a qualification for expertise on a topic, then what is? Aren’t government officials supposed to be relying on them? And if, for example, the topic is Syria, then shouldn’t all individuals who have terminal degrees on Syria be the “experts” who are invited, on a randomized basis, to comment to the public about Syria-related issues? If that were the case, then perhaps many Americans would know that the U.S. and NATO “began operations in April- May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria,” “organizing defectors in Syria,” and “smuggle U.S. weapons into Syria, participate in U.S. psychological and information warfare inside Syria” to produce regime-change there, and that Syria had never posed any threat to U.S. national security. And Barack Obama was hoping for such opportunities to overthrow Syria’s Government even when he became President in 2009. If the American public didn’t know those things at the time, then perhaps America’s censorship was total — which would indicate how absolutely crucial a randomization of the public’s information-sources is, so as to replace the power that the existing mainstrean ‘news’-media have over the public’s mind, in America, and in its vassal-nations (which don’t yet include Syria). If the public do not have unprejudiced — which means entirely uncensored — information presented routinely to them, then democracy isn’t even possible.

Anyway: that is one proposed way of replacing censorship, and overcoming dictatorship. How many politicians are proposing such changes? Why aren’t any? Are all of them afraid of the dictators? Is there no basis for hope, at all?

Will Censorship Prevail over the First Amendment?

Posted on by
Reply

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

I remember when censorship in America was a limited phemonenon.  It applied during war time—“loose lips sink ships.”  It applied to pornography.  It applied to curse words on the public airwaves and in movies.  It applied to violence in movies.  There could be violence, but not the level that has become common.

Today censorship is ubiquitous.  It is everywhere.  In the United States censorship is both imposed from above and flows from the bottom up.  Censorship is imposed from above by, for example, TV and print media, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and by laws in 28 states prohibiting criticism and participation in boycotts of Israel and by President Trump’s executive order preventing federal funding of educational institutions that permit criticisms of Israel. Censorship flows from the bottom up by, for example, people of protected races, genders, and sexual preference claiming to be offended. 

The ubiquitous censorship that today is characteristic of the United States has shut down comedians. It has shut down criticism of non-whites, homosexuals, transgendered, feminists, and Israel. Official explanations are shielded by labeling skeptics “conspiracy theorists.”  The ubiquitous censorship in the United States is an extraordinary development as the US Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and a free press.

We owe journalist Abby Martin appreciation for reminding us of our right to free speech.  Abby is suing the state of Georgia, one of 28 states that have violated the Constitutional protection of free speech.

Abby was scheduleded to give the keynote speech at a conference at Georgia Southern Univeristy.  She discovered that in order to speak publicly at a Georgia college she had to sign a pledge of allegience not to criticize Israel.  Her refusal to sign resulted in the conference being cancelled.

Here we have the state of Georgia blocking free speech because it will not support the Israeli position on Palestine. See: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/no_author/journalist-abby-martin-sues-state-of-georgia-over-law-requiring-pledge-of-allegiance-to-israel/ .  Also:  https://www.timesofisrael.com/filmmaker-who-wouldnt-sign-georgias-oath-not-to-boycott-israel-sues-us-state/ 

Think about this for a moment. More than half of the 50 states that comprise the United States have passed laws that are clear violations of the US Constitution.  Moreover, these 28 states have imposed censorship in behalf of a foreign country.  Americans have gags stuck in their mouths because 28 state governments put the interest of Israel higher than the First Amendment of the US Constitution. When government itself is opposed to free speech, what becomes of democracy and accountable government?

Why would 28 states legislate against the US Constitution?  One explanation is that the state governments were bought by the Israel Lobby with money under the table, by promises of political campaign donations, or by threats of financing rival candidates.  How else do we explain 28 state governments imposing censorship in behalf of a foreign country?

Abby Martin is one person who will not stand for it.  She has brought a lawsuit that—if the US Supreme Court is still a protector of the First Amendment—will result in the 28 state laws and Trump’s executive order being overturned.  The protection of Israel against boycotts parallels state laws passed in the 1950s that prevented Martin Luther King’s movement from boycotting businesses that practiced racial segregation. These laws were overturned by the Supreme Court.

The outcome of Abby Martin’s suit will tell us whether the US Constitution is still a living document.