Tag Archives: free speech

Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress “threats” as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.

“There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,” The Intercept reports.

“Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,” says The Intercept. “Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.’”

While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows “CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,” while critics argue that “suggestions” from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.

“When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University’s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”

The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as “our cognitive infrastructure”:

Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

Another CISA official is seen suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits “to avoid the appearance of government propaganda”:

To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn’t like there’d be no qualms about calling it what it is:

“If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America’s “cognitive infrastructure” originated with the “allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.” To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.

Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod’s new report with Mintpress News that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod’s ongoing documentation of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and the revelation that The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.

We’re destroying western values to defend western values. To win its much-touted struggle of “democracies vs autocracies“, western civilization is becoming more and more autocratic. Censoring more. Trolling more. Propagandizing more. Jailing journalists. Becoming less and less transparent. Manipulating information and people’s understanding of truth.

We’re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we’re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.

I keep thinking of the (fictional) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, “Then what are we fighting for?” If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?

Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We’re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.

If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what’s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do.

As westerners in “liberal democracies” we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.

Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.

The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.

In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.

Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what’s the point of defeating autocracy?

Overthrow the Government: All the Ways in Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” — Abraham Lincoln

It’s easy to become discouraged about the state of our nation.

We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.

It’s harder to believe that change is possible, that the system can be reformed, that politicians can be principled, that courts can be just, that good can overcome evil, and that freedom will prevail.

So where does that leave us?

Benjamin Franklin provided the answer. As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention trudged out of Independence Hall on September 17, 1787, an anxious woman in the crowd waiting at the entrance inquired of Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

What Franklin meant, of course, is that when all is said and done, we get the government we deserve.

Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, twenty-plus years after 9/11 and with the nation just emerging from two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being persecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights and speaking out against government corruption. Activists are being arrested and charged for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.

The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against red flag gun laws, militarized police, SWAT team raids, and government agencies armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield.

The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or encroaching on your private property unless they have evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of governmental police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise), and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.

As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.

Thus, if there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

In other words, it’s our job to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

We are supposed to be the masters and they—the government and its agents—are the servants.

We the American people—the citizenry—are supposed to be the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”

Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one.

A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.

It gets worse.

Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, a startling number of respondents believed that the “right to own a pet” and the “right to drive a car” were part of the First Amendment. Another 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.

Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

So what’s the solution?

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties”  is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have the power to make and break the government.

The powers-that-be want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own. They also want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day.

Yet there are 330 million of us in this country. Imagine what we could accomplish if we actually worked together, presented a united front, and spoke with one voice.

Tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.

Deafening Silences: propaganda through censorship, smearing and coercion

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By Dr Piers Robinson

Source: Off-Guardian

There is a case to be made that the most important part of any propaganda campaign is the drive to ensure that certain voices, claims and arguments either never see the light of day or otherwise remain contained within “fringe” or “alternative” circles.

Since the start of the COVID event, authorities around the world have sought to implement quite extraordinary policies including the so-called “locking down” of entire populations, compulsory masking and coercion through, for example, the mandating of multiple ‘vaccine’ injections. Many of these policies fly in the face of long-established and well-evidenced public health approaches to dealing with respiratory viruses whilst the scientific cogency of these measures – including lockdowns, community masking and “vaccine” injections – is coming under increased scrutiny.

At the same time, the catastrophic consequences, the so-called “collateral damage” (a military euphemism for wartime civilian casualties), of these extreme policies for populations around the world is becoming well-established. Randomised controlled trials of the injections to date have not shown net overall benefit, while accumulating evidence from passive reporting suggests they may be a cause of significant levels of harm. A central part of selling these extreme, and ultimately highly destructive, policies has involved the use of propaganda.

One of the problems with researching and writing about propaganda is that many people believe it to be alien to democratic states. However, as Edward Bernays, considered by many to be a key figure in the development of 20th century propaganda techniques, explained and promoted…

the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

At least to an extent, this belief in propaganda rests upon an assumption or belief that people are ultimately selfish, egotistical, power-hungry and hedonistic beings who require guidance and incentive; it therefore follows that propaganda is required by powerful actors in order to provide a degree of structure, order and purpose to a given society. In contrast, if one assumes that humans are ultimately good and well-inclined towards each other and to the natural world, and that they are capable of great things if conditions permit, propaganda emerging from self-interested and powerful actors equates to a parasite within the human mind that seeks to lead humans away from their better instincts [1].

To this one might add the propensity of those with power to define themselves as the arbiters of truth and morality:

The moral attitudes of dominant and privileged groups are characterised by universal self-deception and hypocrisy. The unconscious and conscious identification of their special interests with general interests and universal values […]. […] the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.[2]

Whatever one’s position on the justifiability of propaganda, and although we usually call these techniques by different names today, employing euphemisms such as “public relations” or “strategic communication”, it is a fact that techniques of manipulation are part and parcel of contemporary liberal democracies.

PROMOTING THE NARRATIVE

In the case of the COVID-19 event, propaganda has been deployed across democracies on an unprecedented scale. In order to gain compliance with the unorthodox and intrusive measures adopted during the COVID-19 event many forms of “non-consensual persuasion” have been employed, ranging from manipulated messaging designed to increase “fear levels” through to coercion.

Indeed, very early on it came to light that behavioural scientists were providing advice to the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). UKColumn reported that this group, named the “Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviour (SPI-B)”, was (re)convened on 13 February 2020. One document produced by this group identified “options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures” which include persuasion, incentivization and coercion.

In the section on “persuasion” it states that the…

perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging

The document also referred to using…

media to increase sense of personal threat.

Many of these “behavioural science” approaches to manipulation used in the UK context have been documented in Laura Dodsworth’s influential work State of Fear whilst Dr Gary Sidley has written about the remarkable reluctance of anyone in authority to accept responsibility for the deliberate manipulation of the public. Dr Colin Alexander has, for some time, been tracking the propaganda output across the UK public sphere.

More widely, and as described by Iain Davis, these approaches have been paralleled at the global level. In February 2020, according to Davis, the World Health Organisation (WHO) had established the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG);

The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Professor Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant*.

Since then, Susan Michie has taken over as chair.

CREATING DEAFENING SILENCES

One aspect of the COVID-19 event propaganda has been the aggressive promotion of official narratives; but just as important has been the suppression and censorship of those questioning authorities. Indeed, there is a case to be made that the most important part of any propaganda campaign is the drive to ensure that certain voices, claims and arguments either never see the light of day or otherwise remain contained within “fringe” or “alternative” circles.

Part of this process of suppressing arguments and opinion involves superficially well-meaning attempts to manage what has been increasingly labelled as “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Elizabeth Woodworth documents the emergence of the so-called Trusted News Initiative (TNI) prior to the 2020 COVID-19 event and which involved a coalition of mainstream/legacy media establishing a network that would serve to combat “misinformation” and “bias”. She quotes the then BBC Director-General Tony Hall:

“Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation and bias … I’m determined that we use [the BBC’s] unique reach and trusted voice to lead the way – to create a global alliance for integrity in news. We’re ready to do even more to help promote freedom and democracy worldwide”

By 2020, according to Woodworth, the TNI had incorporated “Twitter, Microsoft, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism” and, predictably, adopted the role of tackling “harmful coronavirus disinformation”.

In the UK at least, there has also been military involvement with the 77th Brigade operating as part of the COVID-19 communication strategy. 77th Brigade activities include information warfare and “supporting counter-adversarial information activity” which includes…

creating and disseminating digital and wider media content in support of designated tasks.

Tobias Ellwood, who is both a Member of Parliament and Chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, is, remarkably, a reservist with 77th Brigade. In an answer to a written question in parliament it was confirmed that “members of the Army’s 77th Brigade” are…

currently supporting the UK government’s Rapid Response Unit in the Cabinet Office and are working to counter dis-information about COVID-19.

The Rapid Response Unit itself was established in 2018 in order to, according to its head Fiona Bartosch, counter “misinformation” and “disinformation”, and “reclaim a fact-based public debate”.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also followed a similar tack cautioning the public about “misinformation” and “disinformation”. In a release titled “Let’s flatten the infodemic curve”, they advise people to refer to “factcheckers” and legacy media:

When in doubt, consult trusted fact-checking organizations, such as the International Fact-Checking Network and global news outlets focused on debunking misinformation, including the Associated Press and Reuters

The WHO describes in detail its involvement with social media and “big tech”:

“WHO has been working closely with more than 50 digital companies and social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitch, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google, Viber, WhatsApp and YouTube, to ensure that science-based health messages from the organization or other official sources appear first when people search for information related to COVID-19. WHO has also partnered with the Government of the United Kingdom on a digital campaign to raise awareness of misinformation around COVID-19 and encourage individuals to report false or misleading content online. In addition, WHO is creating tools to amplify public health messages – including its  WHO Health Alert chatbot, available on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Viber – to provide the latest news and information on how individuals can protect themselves and others from COVID-19.”

AN INSTITUTIONALISED CULTURE OF CENSORSHIP AND SUPPRESSION OF “WRONG THINK”

These developments, along with others to be documented in due course via work at PANDA, would appear to have had major consequences in terms of suppression of debate. A preliminary examination of events over the last 2.5 years indicates this suppression has operated in at least three different ways:

  • direct censorship through removal of content and deplatforming;
  • sponsoring of hostile coverage designed to smear and intimidate anyone raising critical questions regarding the COVID-19 narrative;
  • coercive approaches involving threats to livelihood and employment.

I shall deal with each in turn.

• Censorship and deplatforming

Formal approaches to censorship via state-backed action were seen early on in the UK context with the regulatory body OFCOM issuing guidelines to broadcasters.

Dodsworth (p.31) reports that broadcasters were instructed to be alert to:

health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful: accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it”(Dodsworth p. 31).

One possible manifestation of this policy was the remarkable instruction issued to Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta. On October 14, 2020, she appeared on BBC News to talk about the lockdowns imposed in the north of England. It is claimed that just before she went on air, one of the producers told her not to mention the Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed by eminent scientists setting out an alternative policy that would avoid lockdowns and other unorthodox measures.

Across social media, from almost day one of the COVID-19 event, tech giants (“big tech”) were willingly signing up to a strategy of censorship.

In April 2020 it was reported that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had declared that it would act to remove anything going “against World Health Organization” recommendations. Notable removals from YouTube included interviews with Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University and British physician Professor Karol Sikora whilst US Senator Rand Paul’s speech questioning the efficacy of facemasks in August 2021 was removed by YouTube. Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the MRnA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, and who has become a notable critic of official policies and narratives, was also removed from Twitter.

A large part of the policing of debate across social media platforms has involved issuance of warnings that a given post violates “community standards” in some way and some, such as LinkedIn, state that content at variance with authorities can lead to censoring. As Dr David Thunder has documented, the exact wording of Linkedin’s policy on “misinformation” states: “Do not share content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.“

Thunder notes:

What does this actually mean, in practice? It means that some select persons, just because they got nominated to a “public health authority” or a “leading global health organization,” are protected by Linkedin from any robust criticism from the public or from other scientists.

Furthermore, censorship and suppression of academic debate has been reported with respect to academic journals whereby articles and research running against the so-called scientific consensus appear to have been unfairly removed or blocked. For example Dr Peter McCullough reports unjustified censorship of a peer reviewed and published article relating to COVID-19 whilst, more broadly, undue suppression of legitimate research findings was reported by Dr Tess Lawrie with respect to Ivermectin trials. All of these are worrying indications that academic processes themselves have become subject to nefarious censorship and control.

The censorship continues unabated and it might even be intensifying. Whilst detailed and systematic research should be conducted in order to identify the scale and range of the censorship that has been occurring, it is reasonably clear now that, relative to pre-2020, the levels are unprecedented and represent a normalization, or routinization, of censorship.

• Character Assassination through Smearing

Suppression of debate is achieved not only through formal censorship, but also through indirect tactics whereby attempts are made to destroy the reputation of those challenging power. Although perhaps not widely appreciated, the tactic of character assassination appears to have become more prevalent in recent years and it appears to be an important feature of contemporary propaganda and our ‘democratic’ landscape.

Broadly speaking, smear campaigns are designed to avoid substantive rational debate and instead denigrate the person making the argument – ‘playing the man rather than the ball’ or ‘shooting the messenger’. A feature of smear campaigns is the use of identity politics sensibilities such as concern (legitimate) over racism and the deployment of pejorative and tendentious labels. For example, those questioning COVID-19 policies have sometimes been described as far right or fascist whilst pejorative use of the term “conspiracy theorist” is frequently employed to describe those questioning official narratives.

Smear campaigns can be justifiably seen as underhand and disreputable approaches to challenging dissenting voices and they frequently pass off without observers or even the victims being fully aware that they are being targeted: those ordering or enabling the smears have good reason to avoid being uncovered whilst those executing the smears, i.e. the journalists, will defend their hit pieces as legitimate critique.

In the case of the COVID-19 event, however, at least one high level smear campaign has been identified.

At the time of the release of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) during autumn 2020, the authors were only aware of a barrage of hostile media attention such as the above noted instruction by the BBC to Professor Sunetra Gupta to not mention the Declaration during an interview. But at least some of the hostile coverage was not simply a spontaneous reaction by journalists but had been initiated by high-level officials. When the GBD was published, leaked emails showed Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussing the need to swiftly shut it down. Collins wrote in an email that this…

proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.

Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed.

Other prominent instances, unproven but which bear the hallmarks of a directed smear campaign, include repeated attacks on the popular US podcaster Joe Rogan. In the European sphere, Professor Bhakdi, an early and prominent critic of COVID-19 policies has been repeatedly accused of anti-semitism and is now being prosecuted by the German authorities for inciting hatred (*see Endnotes for alt. link -Ed.). None of the accusations made in these attacks appear to be reasonable. Rogan, for example, was chastised for promoting the use of Ivermectin with many journalists referring to it, misleadingly, as “horse dewormer”. The vast bulk of Bhakdi’s work and output concerns the COVID-19 policies and, relatively speaking, his references to any issue related to Judaism is at most vanishingly small.

A subtle and arguably more widespread form of smearing involves the routine labelling of information by social media companies as harmful; for example the independent UK-based outlet OffGuardian has its tweets subject to a blanket warning suggesting their output might be ‘unsafe’ and contain…

violent or misleading content that could lead to real-world harm.

Such labelling is, arguably, defamatory.

• Coercion

Suppression of inconvenient opinions works through both the realm of information – censoring a person’s voice or ad hominem attacks – but also through action in the real, “material”, world via coercion. This could be the creation of conditions that deter people from speaking their mind by offering material incentives or, alternatively, threatening to deplete someone’s material circumstances. Put simply, the threat of loss of earnings.

In the case of the COVID-19 event the role of coercion can be seen through the threats to employment experienced by those challenging the narrative.

For example, Professor Julie Ponesse was forced from her position at Western University in Canada because of her refusal to receive the COVID-19 injection following the issuing of “vaccine” mandate there whilst a similar fate was suffered by Dr Aaron Kheriarty (Professor at University of California Irvine, School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program). Other academics have cited lack of institutional support with respect to their academic freedom, such as Professor Martin Kuldorff.

The coercive nature of mandates is particularly pernicious in that their implementation in universities forces ‘dissident’ academics to either go against their beliefs and opinions and comply or otherwise leave their posts. The disciplining effect is, of course, much more widely felt across the academy: the few who lose their posts serve as a warning to everyone else to reconsider their beliefs and actions. In particular, younger academics and those completing their PhDs will come to understand that compliance with the dominant narrative is the only realistic option if they are to realise their goal of an academic career.

The tactics of censorship, smearing and coercion are synergistic and help construct an environment in which self censorship becomes ubiquitous: Deplatforming of dissident scientists sends a clear warning as to the subject matter and issues that are off limits whilst examples of smearing highlight the potential unpleasant consequences of discussing such issues.

Coercion acts as a final hardstop for anyone entertaining the possibility of risking talking about censored issues and riding out the smears that will result: loss of job and income is simply too much to bear. Overall, the role of authorities in enabling censorship and coercion results in, broadly speaking, an institutionalised culture in which suppression of opinions and debate becomes the norm.

THE DANGERS TO DEMOCRACY AND RATIONAL DEBATE: ONLINE HARM LEGISLATION AND DIS/MISINFORMATION ‘FACT CHECKERS’

Clearly this situation has deleterious consequences for rational debate and democracy. John Stuart Mill explained that silencing the expression of an opinion robs us all of the opportunity to either hear an argument that might turn out to be true, or refine or reject an opinion that is faulty. There are very good reasons for this, as Mill notes:

First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. … All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

And:

if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Scientific and scholarly research demands such openness to questioning and critique and, behind concepts such as tenure, is the core grounding for the academy that scholars need to be allowed to present what might appear to be controversial and even offensive (to some) opinions.

Of course, there are well argued and established limits to freedom of expression – incitement to violence for example – but we are not talking about the usual areas of debate and controversy that lie at the limits of permissible speech. Rather, we are talking about the right of people to raise questions and concerns about policies that directly affect them, such as lockdown, masking and ‘vaccinations’, and, moreover, the right of credentialed experts to raise such questions in the public sphere. That the censorship, smearing and coercion of such people has come to be tolerated is a clear indicator of how far our democracies have slipped into an authoritarian abyss.

And things are, potentially, about to become even worse with the pushing through of so-called ‘online harm bills’ including in the UK, Europe and Canada. In the UK, the proposed bill creates a category of legal but ‘harmful’ speech: as described by the pressure group Big Brother Watch:

Under the threat of penalties, the legislation will compel online intermediaries to censor swathes of online discussion including in matters of general discourse and public policy. Harmful content is defined entirely by the Secretary of State who is also granted a host of executive powers throughout the legislation.

Liberty has explained further the potential dangers of such developments:

We are concerned that the ‘legal but harmful’ category set out in the OSB is inadequately prescribed by law and risks disproportionately infringing on individuals’ right to freedom of expression and privacy. In particular, we are concerned about the wide definition of online harm as meaning “physical or psychological harm” (clause 187). This is an extremely low threshold, and encompasses innumerable kinds of harm, the extent of which in our view far exceeds the qualifications on Article 10 provided by the ECHR and HRA.

And, as Lord Sumption points out regarding the proposed UK online harm bill:

The real vice of the bill is that its provisions are not limited to material capable of being defined and identified. It creates a new category of speech which is legal but ‘harmful’. The range of material covered is almost infinite, the only limitation being that it must be liable to cause ‘harm’ to some people. Unfortunately, that is not much of a limitation. Harm is defined in the bill in circular language of stratospheric vagueness. It means any ‘physical or psychological harm’. As if that were not general enough, ‘harm’ also extends to anything that may increase the likelihood of someone acting in a way that is harmful to themselves, either because they have encountered it on the internet or because someone has told them about it.”

It is likely that such legislative developments will operate in tandem with so-called “fact checking” entities and algorithms that work to define and then exclude what is defined as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and now “malinformation”.

The latter two are being defined now as, respectively, false information spread in order to mislead or cause harm and accurate information which is used out of context in order to harm or mislead. These terms are so nebulous that they will enable authorities to proscribe virtually any serious debate or criticism in the public sphere.

Here we see the continuing development and entrenchment of the mis/disinformation fact checking industry noted earlier. During the COVID-19 event the United Nations itself started working with the public relations entity Purpose to “combat the growing scourge of COVID-19 misinformation” which is described as a “virus spread by people”.

Purpose states:

[t]hrough Verified, we are leveraging the UN brand, as well as popular brands that connect audiences online and offline: from Cartoon Network in Brazil to Flipkart in India.

UNESCO, similarly, is promoting education about so-called “conspiracy theories”. Remarkably, and in apparent contradiction to rhetoric regarding inclusiveness and community-driven decisionmaking, the WHO actually asks people to report on people spreading “misinformation”: As such, an un-elected international organization is actively advocating for the suppression of free speech in democratic societies.

Entities tasked with deciding what is true and what is false, as opposed to allowing ideas and arguments to be openly debated as Mill would suggest, are already creating the link between dis/misinformation and harm. For example, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a state-sponsored think tank, attacked the disparate groups questioning the COVID-19 response with a publication titled “Between Conspiracy and Extremism: A Long COVID Threat?” The institute tweeted:

Today we launch a new series of reports on the global anti-lockdown movement, beginning with this paper examining how COVID restrictions have brought together a broad church of activists in a conspiracy-extremist movement we call a ‘hybrid threat’

On the issue of coercive measures, the recent passing of a bill in California, that will enable doctors who spread ‘false information’ to be charged with ‘unprofessional conduct’ and have their licenses revoked, is a worrying sign of just how aggressive authorities are becoming.

The trajectory here is clear to discern and it entails the move to a world where the truth is defined by factcheckers and authorities, and legislation provides the underlying coercive framework to ensure any deviance is punished. This is entirely at odds with basic principles of open debate, objective scholarship and freedom of expression and is not compatible with democracy.

THE END OF DEMOCRACY?

There is nothing new about censorship, smearing and coercion in western democracies. For some time now, those questioning, for example, western foreign policy have been subjectedto such tactics whilst the broader 9/11 global war on terror spawned wide ranging examples of censorship, smearing and coercion in order to shore up official narratives and the belligerent wars that have been fought under its banner.

Indeed, in the realm of foreign policy and war, the prevalence of propaganda and associated drives to marginalise dissent are well known to researchers in these fields. And, today, in 2022, we are witnessing a preeminent example of coercion as we see the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, facing the prospect of deportation to the US and the rest of his life in prison. His crime was to reveal accurate information about the 9/11 wars, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little reason to doubt that authorities in the West are seeking to make a powerful example of Assange; a warning to the rest of us as to the price of questioning our governments when they commit illegal wars of aggression.

What is new with the COVID-19 event is a combination of the spread of these strategies of suppression and a sharp uptick in awareness amongst increasingly large swathes of the population as to the existence of propaganda in democracies. The spread can be seen in how it is now a large number of medical scientists who have been at the receiving end of drives to suppress debate, whereas before it was often just a handful of relatively unknown dissident social scientists researching foreign policy issues.

Regarding public awareness, attempting to censor high profile researchers from the medical sciences alerts more of the public as to what is going on.

And, of course, as we rapidly see the dissident scientists now being vindicated by the facts – lockdowns don’t work, the “vaccinations” can harm etc – more people become aware of the basic truth that the official COVID-19 response has been underpinned by ferocious propaganda campaigns designed to silence any experts speaking truth to power.

It is also apparently the case that trust in mainstream, or legacy, media continues a sharp decline whilst, presumably, increasing numbers of people seek out the new independent media platforms and go to organisations such as PANDA and HART for reliable information on COVID-19 related issues and more widely. [3]

And yet the broader trajectory for our public spheres looks ominous.

Further legislative measures to redefine free speech, networks of sponsored factcheckers defining what is and what is not, resources poured into censoring, smearing and coercing dissident voices all parallel what some analysts argue is a wider drive to restructure Western societies.

Ending any semblance of democracy may indeed be the goal, starting with the ending of freedom of expression. There are likely to be dark days ahead and it has never been so important for there to be a robust and uncompromising defence of freedom of expression.

Endnotes:

  1. Thanks to Colin Alexander for comments on the justifiability of propaganda and to David Bell, Maryam Ebadi, Gary Sidley and David Thunder for other comments and feedback.
  2. Niebuhr, R., (1932), Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons.
  3. The array of new and independent media and organisations is vast; some of those, with which the author is most familiar, include media such as OffGuardian, Multipolar, the Grayzone, Unlimited Hangout, UKColumn; and Organisations such as Brownstone Institute, Would Council for Health, Children’s Health Defence, Global Collateral.

Masters of Deceit: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear, Mind Control & Brain Warfare

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.

It’s all documented, too.

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.

Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda.

In the 1950s, MK-ULTRA, the mind control program developed under CIA director Allen Dulles as part of his brain warfare Cold War campaigns, subjected hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel to doses of LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. For Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA hired prostitutes to lure men into a bugged room, where they would be dosed with LSD and observed having sex

As Brianna Nofil explains, “MK-Ultra’s ‘mind control’ experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.”

The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

As one study reported, detainees held in CIA safe-houses abroad “were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis and torture, to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”

Similarly, the top-secret Montauk Project, the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, allegedly was working to develop mind-control techniques that would then be tested out on locals in a nearby village, triggering crime waves or causing teenagers to congregate.

As journalist Lorraine Boissoneault concludes, “Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.”

Fast forward to the present day, and it’s clear that the government—aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation—has updated its psy ops warfare for a new era. For instance, the government has been empowered to use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

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. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Back in 2014, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain).

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic could easily be considered psychological warfare disguised as a pandemic threat. As science writer David Robson explains: “Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic… Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations… Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease… the evocative images of a pandemic led [participants in an experiment] to value conformity and obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.”

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm.

This is not a new experiment in mind control.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

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 what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

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. 

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is yet another key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, to this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

For years now, the powers-that-be—those politicians and bureaucrats who think like tyrants and act like petty dictators regardless of what party they belong to—have attempted to brainwash us into believing that we have no rights: to think for ourselves, make decisions about our health, protect our homes and families and businesses, act in our best interests, demand accountability and transparency from government, or generally operate as if we are in control of our own lives.

Well, the government is wrong.

We have every right, and you know why? Because, as the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights—to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness—that no government can take away from us.

It’s time we started reminding the government that “we the people” are the ones in charge.

The Trouble With ‘Western Values’ Is That Westerners Don’t Value Them

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Have you ever noticed how those who shriek the loudest about tyranny in foreign countries are always the same people calling for the censorship and deplatforming of anyone who criticizes the western empire?

It’s a ubiquitous mind virus throughout western society. Anyone — and I do mean anyone — who aggressively and consistently criticizes the foreign policy of the US and its allies in front of a sizeable audience gets branded a Russian agent by empire apologists, and this consensus is accompanied by the steadily growing opinion that Russia’s operatives and useful idiots should be banned from western platforms.

Defenders of the western empire won’t admit to wanting all empire critics silenced, but that’s what you get when you combine (A) the fact that they view everyone who criticizes the empire with sufficient aggression as a Russian agent with (B) their opinion that those given to Russian influence ought to be censored. Whenever I criticize the foreign policy of the western empire I get its apologists telling me I’d never be allowed to criticize my rulers like that if I lived in a nation like Russia or China, when they know full well that if it were up to them I wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the western empire here either. They are the same as the tyrants they claim to despise.

The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.

In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.

People tell me “Move to Russia!” or “Move to China!” depending on what aspect of the empire’s global power agendas I happen to be criticizing at the moment, and I always want to tell them, no, you move to Russia. You move to China. You’re the one trying to suppress dissent and criticism of the powerful. I’m the one who is living by western values as they were sold to me and demanding normal scrutiny of the most powerful empire that has ever existed. You don’t belong here.

In school we are taught that our society values truth, free speech, equality, accountability for the powerful, and adversarial journalism, then we grow up and we see everyone rending their garments because institutions like CBS News or Amnesty International let slip one small report which doesn’t fully comply with the official line of our rulers. We see Russian media banned and censorship protocols expanded to the enthusiastic cheerleading of mainstream liberals. We see astroturf trolling operations used to mass report and shout down those who scrutinize the establishment line about Ukraine on social media. We see Julian Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of unauthorized journalism.

It’s obvious with a look around that the “western values” we’re all told about are not actually terribly common in the west. Look at the west’s major media platforms and they virtually never platform anyone who is meaningfully critical of the real centers of power in western civilization. Look at western governments and they continually dance to the beat of oligarchy and empire regardless of how people vote in their supposedly free democratic elections. Look at the internet and it’s actually very difficult to find authentic criticisms of imperial power unless you already know where to look.

Some of us bought into those western values we were taught about in school, but it’s not the people you’ve been trained to expect. It’s we marginalized outsiders who are adamantly opposing censorship, propaganda and the empire’s war on the press while continuously working to shine the light of truth on the mechanisms of power from the fringes, while we are being yelled at and accused of treason by mainstream sycophants who have far more in common with the autocrats they claim to oppose than with the western values they purport to uphold.

Repression, Terror, Fear: The Government Wants to Silence the Opposition

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Lockdowns.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who speak out against government corruption, misconduct and abuse.

These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.

We didn’t know it then, but what happened five years ago in Charlottesville, Va., was a foretaste of what was to come.

At the time, Charlottesville was at the center of a growing struggle over how to reconcile the right to think and speak freely, especially about controversial ideas, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything—words and images—that might cause offense. That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.

In attempting to err on the side of political correctness by placating one group while muzzling critics of the city’s actions, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.

That’s when everything went haywire.

When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.

On August 12, 2017, government officials took what should have been a legitimate exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turned it into a lesson in authoritarianism by manipulating warring factions and engineering events in such a way as to foment unrest, lockdown the city, and justify further power grabs.

On the day of scheduled protests, police deliberately engineered a situation in which two opposing camps of protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to justify allowing the government to shut everything down.

Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard)—many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months—had been called on to work the event, and police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, police failed to do their jobs.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.”

“Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville,” reported ProPublica.

Incredibly, when the first signs of open violence broke out, the police chief allegedly instructed his staff to “let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”

In this way, police who were supposed to uphold the law and prevent violence failed to do either.

Indeed, a 220-page post-mortem of the protests and the Charlottesville government’s response by former U.S. attorney Timothy J. Heaphy concluded that “the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety.”

In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates.

The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers.

And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.

This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.

Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, police stand down, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the police state. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.

They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.

They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.

They want us silent, servile and compliant.

They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting politically correct efforts to whitewash the past, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.  

And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Why else do you think Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues to molder in jail for daring to blow the whistle about the U.S. government’s war crimes, while government officials who rape, plunder and kill walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist?

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.

Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, we need to remember that we’ve all got rights, and we need to exercise them.

Most of all, we need to protect the rights of the people to speak truth to power, whatever that truth might be. Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.

Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked:

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet… [A]t the constitutional level, speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive… [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

In other words, the Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).

Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.

Will Truth Be Criminalized?

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The Establishment’s determination to close down narrative-challenger Alex Jones has put Sandy Hook back in the news.  As First Amendment protection is fading, I checked to see what I had written about Sandy Hook.  I was relieved to see that I had only reported on the skepticism and asked questions.

My search of the IPE archives brought up my articles on other controversial shootings–Las Vegas and Orlando–and the Oklahoma City Bombing.  The common thread in all of these incidents is that the narrative is established the minute the news is reported, and officials and media never vary from the narrative.  As soon as it happens, the government and the media already know what happened.  No investigation ever takes place.  It was the same for President Kennedy’s assassination, his brother’s assassination, 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, etc.

Legitimate questions about the narratives are ignored by officials and media who seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bury the truth.  Skeptics, no matter how prominent or fact-based are demonized as “conspiracy theorists” unworthy of attention.  

Clearly, America no longer has a media watchdog.  America has a propaganda ministry for official narratives.

What this tells us should shock every American, every US puppet government, and Washington’s chosen enemies–Russia, China, and Iran–respect  for truth is hard to find in the American media and the American government.

In the not distant future, it will become actionable to doubt the presstitues and the government on the grounds that doubt implies disbelief and disbelief is a crime or proves that you are a foreign agent.  Slander and libel will evolve to apply to media and government as institutions.  As we are so gullible, so trusting, we are going to be reduced to silence or praise.  Silence will bring official suspicion.  Praise of the false narratives will bring career success and rewards.  This is the stark situation that we face.

It is unclear that anything can be done to rectify this situation.  Older Americans generally are comfortable with the idea that government and media have integrity.  This is their picture of the  bygone world that they grew up in.  Younger people have been indoctrinated in schools that government and media protect blacks, homosexuals, and transgendered from racist, homophobic and transphobic white people who use normality as an illegitimate standard of approval. Sodom and Gomorrah are approved, but not the white family unit.

Can we believe that there is a future for freedom in America when Democrats, media, CIA, FBI, and NSA can create a narrative of President Donald Trump as a Russian agent?

Can we believe that there is a future for freedom in America when the same collection of schemers can create a show trial of the President of the United States planning a coup by a couple of hundred unarmed supporters seizing the government of the United States by walking around in the Capitol and sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair?

Can we believe that Americans sufficiently stupid to believe such implausible narratives have any possibility of holding on to their freedom?

The Illusion of Freedom: We’re Only as Free as the Government Allows

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin

We’re in a national state of denial.

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.  

For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.