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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/84780/combating-the-censorship-industrial.html

Combating The Censorship Industrial Complex

It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files—the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship—was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.  

 

For six months, not much of consequence has happened, either in Washington or the mainstream media, in response. Those who owe us mea culpas have not provided them, tending instead to attack the individual reporters or ignore their findings. Meanwhile, some concerning developments have emerged: Congress formed the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in order to conduct its own investigation, which would have been encouraging had it not culminated in representative Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands threatening Taibbi with imprisonment for his testimony; Mark Warner’s RESTRICT Act, which would yield the federal government an enormous media-censorship leeway, was introduced in the Senate in March; Montana banned TikTok statewide; special counsel John Durham’s report on Russian interference was released and received with a profound lack of interest in the FBI’s dubious and error-laden investigation; and the Global Disinformation Index, a British NGO that ranks news outlets on a scale of “risky” to “least risky” (this website is one of the GDI’s ten “riskiest”), was shown to have received funding from the State Department (via the National Endowment for Democracy), which it subsequently lost.  

As shocking and foreboding as these anti-democratic actions are, not many commentators are treating them as interconnected expressions of a single censorship apparatus. Michael Shellenberger and his colleagues Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi are now undertaking a monumental attempt at defining that apparatus: they call it the Censorship Industrial Complex. Shellenberger and Gutentag are two of the few journalists who not only take the reality of increased government censorship efforts seriously but also consider it a systemic, unified, and global threat, as opposed to a few discreet but regrettable extensions of U.S. political power.  

The complex is founded on euphemistic, Astro-turfed neologisms—“misinformation,” “disinformation,” “infodemic,” and, absurdly, “malinformation,” which is defined by The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency as information “which is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate” (my emphasis)—and prosecuted by a coterie of journalists, academics, NGOs and nonprofits who claim neutral expertise in adjudicating what is true and what is false. World governments have eerily aligned their definitions of these terms and then cooperated with non-state actors to censor online speech in accordance, all with the stated and ostensibly noble aim of “reducing harm.”  

Their reporting, which takes place almost exclusively on Substack and Twitter (Gutentag is also a columnist at Tablet), has called attention to the ways in which major democratic governments in Europe, Canada, the UK, and Ireland are replicating the American tactic: define certain types of speech as harmful and then empower a bureaucratic network of think tanks, research agencies, and nonprofits to enforce strict Internet censorship practices that ensure that so-called harmful speech is repressed.  

The most thorough history of how this bureaucracy came into power was provided by Jacob Siegel, a former U.S Army intelligence officer in both Iraq and Afghanistan, writing in Tablet. Strikingly, Siegel compares the emergence of this new complex to its closest analog in American history: McCarthyism. And he locates its legislative origin on December 23, 2016, the date that Barack Obama signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. What began as a campaign against foreign information warfare morphed into a domestic censorship apparatus in the aftermath of Donald Trump taking office. In this way, it echoes the Military Industrial Complex by leveraging wartime expansions of government authority towards domestic goals. While the primary agents are certain federal intelligence and security agencies and their cooperating NGOs1, Siegel sees the media as playing a remarkably complicit role in the last seven years. “The American press, he writes, “once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S security agencies and party operatives.” 

Shellenberger and Gutentag have provided the first invaluable step in a massive project: they’ve defined the problem. “The Twitter Files gave us a window,” Shellenberger writes, “into how government agencies, civil society, and tech companies work together to censor social media users. Now, key nations are attempting to enshrine this coordination into law explicitly.”  

In November 2022, the E.U. passed the Digital Services Act, which legally compels large online media platforms to remove hate speech and disinformation from their platforms under threat of fines as large as six percent of annual global revenue. If passed in the U.S., RESTRICT, with its loopholes and vague jargon, threatens to give the federal government unprecedented ability to spy on the online activity of its citizens. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022, which passed the lower house of the Irish Parliament, could soon render the possession of “hateful” digital material illegal in that country. Canadian Bill C-11 has passed in the Senate, amending the former Broadcasting Act to allow the government to filter and promote streamed media. Brazil’s proposed Bill 2630, the so-called Fake News Law, will compel social media platforms to regulate “fake news” and misinformation on their platforms more strictly or face severe fines. An early draft of this bill included a provision that would allow the imprisonment for up to five years of anyone spreading content that “threatened social peace and economic order.”  

According to Shellenberger, Gutentag, and their colleagues at the Substack Public, what tends to unify these efforts is a reliance on identical, porous definitions of what counts as bad or hateful information, as well as an emphasis on words such as “safety,” “harm reduction,” and “protection.” This is precisely what makes the Censorship Industrial Complex so insidious. No one wants truly false information to dominate our important discussion spaces, or genuine hate to crowd out constructive public discourse. But the verbiage these governments operate with grants tremendous leeway in how such speech is defined and censored. This slippage has already played out in the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the contents of which were almost immediately deemed “disinformation” as a justification for Twitter to remove the story from its platform in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election; we now know the material was not only legitimate but in the FBI’s possession in December of 2019. 

Shellenberger and Gutentag are calling on any whistleblowers, journalists, or individuals with first-hand experience with this censorship regime to contact them immediately. The first official meeting of this growing anti-censorship movement will be held in London next month. Anyone with information or experience to share is encouraged to reach out on their website, censorshipindustrialcomplex.org, and support Public’s reporting on Substack. 

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https://brownstone.org/articles/3-16-the-day-that-will-live-in-infamy/

3/16: The Day That Will Live in Infamy

We have met the enemy, and they are us

While perhaps the US is a Constitutional republic in form and theory, in terms of function it has devolved into something far less suited to human flourishing.

America has elevated, enabled, and become largely captured by a bureaucratic security apparatus whose raison d’être was purported to be fighting wartime threats.

But the war machine does not exist to produce victory.

The war machine exists to produce war.

And it has brought this warfare home.

And this is not a beneficial state of affairs.

For war is permission to think the unthinkable and an excuse to do that which is inexcusable.

And as this mission has become increasingly constant and expanded into manifold realms of peacetime and peaceful lives, this “security apparatus” has become something altogether different.

It has become a self-perpetuating power base and power structure all its own and this “hidden empire” has come to wield more and more durable influence than the elected officials that give it a patina of credibility and a mask behind which to hide.

The intelligence and even justice agencies wield near impossible power to stand against.

They are the eyes and ears of the state and they leak and manipulate the public to their own ends such that politicians who go against them risk not only the loss of the “intel” to see the world and make choices, but the political annihilation that comes from having “not responded to a claimed threat” in the event anything bad happens.

Upping the ante yet further, the enmity of this “deep state” increasingly seems overtly dangerous and they seem to care less and less about who sees it. They will plot against you, trump up charges and innuendo to discredit you, and allow others to skate scott-free on actions of egregious trespass.

The confluence of intelligence and law enforcement is formidable.

How may one resist such a force that can mire you in blindness, subject you to unjust attack and prosecution, and that will cover up and enable the misdeeds of those with whom it chooses to ally? (Mostly because they do as they are told/go where they are led…)

These praetorians of permanent government have become kingmakers and perhaps kings themselves.

It is extremely telling that the impetus for the sudden volte-face of Fauci and the rest of team Trump to say “time to lock down” came not from the health bureaucracy but from the Office of the National Security Advisor, who placed Debbie Birx in the WH to run the show.

Because you never let a crisis go to waste. 

From 9/11 to 3/16 (the date of 15 days to slow the spread) these attacks and threats are used to suspend and supersede rights and choice. And these powers are never given back. This understate grows in power, reach, and scope.

It’s an inherent emergent property of the fear response. You get people while they are scared and you push them off their spot. Then you never let them back and build new systems and structures to fill and dominate the space where their freedoms were.

The bias in crisis is always more action, more intrusion. It represents a one-sided bet for politicians because if they fail to snap into line, any new attack or bad outcome can be pinned on them.

There is simply no future in saying “Hey, let’s not get too worked up here and relax. This is not a big deal.”

When you win, everyone forgets, but if you lose, you’re done for.

The dominant strategy is always to “do big visible things.”

This is why these outcomes are so predictable.

It’s the default societal method of action and all the crisis and contingency planning, often made by people with little or no actual experience with the issues at hand, sits like unexploded ordinance waiting to go off.

It’s how the bureaucracy grows and gains prominence over the visible government.

It does not matter who you elect or what they promise or what issues they flood your sensorium with: until you address this base issue, it’s greased rails to invisible dictatorship by regulatory and security fiat.

You cannot trade rights for safety.

The whole idea is false. 

The very fact that this dependence on top-down diktat is the force-fed firehose of every public school and university and federal program represents perhaps the greatest false flag operation in human history.

It is not Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

It is Dictatorship Enabling Indoctrination.

This was quite literally the purpose the luminaries who conceived the practice had in mind, right from the start. (Full discussion HERE.) 

The foundational mission statement of public schooling in the US was not to help children grow, but to mold children into that which was useful and obedient to the state.

They did not have you pledge allegiance to truth or logic or liberty, did they?

It is not a coincidence that this mode of memetic contagion has locked on to “structural matters that can only be set right by state intervention” and inflicting guilt and fueling resentment and always driving a sense of fear and dependence.

And if you think school is the only vector by which this is being pursued, I have a rainforest in Saskatchewan to sell you.

From health to lending to light bulbs to cars, the private/public propaganda and panic partnership to frighten and misinform has become one of the primary drivers of functional governance.

You can see it as folks like the cardigan-clad James Bond villain aspirant fund and launch “AI chatbots” to flood the box with pro-covid vaccine “facts” and bury social media under fake claims and comments.

This is only going to get worse as AI gets better.

One might go so far as to argue that informational slanting has become the primary purpose of much of the permanent government bureaucracy and security state. The discovery emerging from the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit is surreal.

It’s even worse than you thought…

The CISA (Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency) has been outright defining the thoughts of Americans as “cognitive infrastructure” that they must “protect.”

They seek not only to dominate information flow and censor, but to actually “pre-bunk” claims, which is to say, get out in front of news and try to head it off and discredit it before it comes out.

Honest question:

If we’re not going to call this “a psyop of security services against we the people,” I’m curious, just how is one to describe this? 

This was likely the source of the endless stories we saw about “suddenly” and “it was always normal” for teens to die of heart attacks and blood clots and who knows what else. It got so you could tell what news was about to break by what the media was suddenly all leaping as one to normalize. 

This behavior is rife in health, in race and gender ideologies, in climate, in economics. Entirely hallucinatory landscapes are being erected to ensure compliance because the bureaucracy of the permanent state will always become its own chief constituent and when the intelligence agencies that are supposed to be the eyes and ears of government become self-serving and corrupt, there is no way out of this hall of mirrors.

Every single one of these “paths to freedom” runs through “giving more power to the state to proscribe your choices, demand your compliance, and take that which is yours and give it to others by threat (or fact) of force.”

Every “license to operate or practice,” every “eco law,” every lending or hiring or associative standard, every program of redistribution, redress, and requirement: it’s all the muscle and marrow of dominion over us and ours and it is more and more made by people who were never elected to anything and view rights as inconvenient, not the reason to have a state in the first place.

It takes everything and fixes nothing.

Because that is its purpose.

It is not intended as a solution; it’s intended as the perpetual instigation of social strife between us that will keep us inflamed against one another and clamorous of ever more intrusion to ameliorate the very wounds it has opened and aggravated.

It’s not a path forward; it’s poison peddled as panacea.

This totalitarian tutelage has reached a point of grave societal danger and as in other such times in American history, we must seek to swing this pendulum back.

And the first step is realizing that the purpose of public schooling and public messaging was never to illuminate but to captivate.

And this requires monopoly and we must break that.

These actors fear the rise of the reputation economy because they know it will exclude them. They want to play with thumbs on scales, not time-tested track records.

And it falls to us to ensure that this is to be a losing game for them.

It falls to us to walk away and build our own. 

Information is not too important to be left to free markets and free people.

It is too important not to be and too powerful a potential for mischief to be left in the hands of the untrustworthy, especially government and government proxies.

One of the great political issues of our time will be the dismantling of these agencies. Until we do, the rest is just set-dressing on the road to serfdom. They have become antithetical to a free people and a free republic.

At a certain point, one must realize that “the call is coming from inside the house” and that the threat is not the shadow-play of frightening monsters but the hands that shape it.

And they are going to tell us absolutely anything to avoid such a realization from emerging, but the tales are already threadbare and tone-deaf and obvious.

And we have and will learn to step around them and we will learn whom to trust.

And we will. The reputation economy is coming whether they like it or not.

So as in all things, when provided with information: always consider the source.