Tag Archives: censorship

Living in the Fact Checkers’ paradise, by Good Citizen

The people fact checking for disinformation come from the same groups that notoriously peddle disinformation. It’s a Soviet-style situation. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.substack.com:

Most people still don’t know the real sources of disinformation.

 
 

The Internet is effectively dead. It has no pulse. They put it on global disinformation remdesivir fact-checking drip and murdered it.

But Good Citizen, what about Substack and the direct-to-inbox newsletter format?!

For how much longer? (Knocks on wood)

One paid subscriber (Hi Ed. Maybe?), who helped create the pensioner discount subscription option, recently said Hotmail was stuffing his spam folder with my emails. He hadn’t seen one in weeks.

How long until Gmail follows? How long until the government leans on all of these pantywaist nerd factories and just starts deleting them right when they hit your inbox?

Maybe the government can do what it does best and destroy it all by incentivizing censorship the same way they incentivized death at hospitals. $10 per blocked email address? $50,000 per banned newsletter? Congress can kick it off with the INTERNET CARES Act.

PayPal is now ditching Substackers after half a decade of targeting anyone to the right of Occasional-Cortex’s Met Gala dress train holder. Bank of America dropped Trump voters who sniffed out election fraud. Wells Fargo is too good for adult film stars who woke one day recently to find all their banking services deleted. Yes, the same Wells Fargo that created millions of fake accounts without customers’ permission and laundered billions in Mexican cartel drug money.

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Shutting Women Up: Emails Between White House and Big Tech Focus on Social Media Warnings of mRNA Vaccination Damage to Menstruation. Did WH Censor Harms to Women? By Dr. Naomi Wolf

Not a good idea to try and shut Dr. Naomi Wolf up. From Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:

My Accurate Tweet Warning of Menstrual Damage post-mRNA Vaccination Appears in Lawsuit’s Discovery.

“NEW EVIDENCE UNCOVERED IN A LAWSUIT’S DISCOVERY SUGGESTS THE WHITE HOUSE ORDERED THE TARGETING-DEPLATFORMING-CENSORING OF DR. NAOMI WOLF

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – SEPTEMBER 9TH, 2022

THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH STRIKES AGAIN – THEY CAN RUN FOR COVER – BUT THEY CANNOT HIDE FROM MISSOURI ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC SCHMITT  or DR. NAOMI WOLF

Dr. Naomi Wolf is a Best-Selling Author and The CEO of Daily Clout

BACKGROUND:

‘On MAY 5TH 2022 Plaintiffs (Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt on behalf of State of Missouri ET AL) filed a complaint [Doc. No. 1] against Government Defendants. In the Complaint and Amended Complaint [Doc. No. 45], Plaintiffs allege Government Defendants have colluded with and/or coerced social media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social media platforms ‘disinformation’, ‘misinformation’ and ‘malinformation. Plaintiffs allege the suppression of disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and contents constitutes government action and violates Plaintiffs’ freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.’

STATEMENT FROM DR. WOLF:

“Today my lawyers submitted a new court filing (see below) with additional documents that show how the executive branch of our federal government worked with Twitter to silence me for asking questions about the Covid-19 vaccines. These documents also appear to show that the censorship project between Twitter and the executive branch began inside the White House. Nobody should be retaliated against for exercising her First Amendment rights. Thank you to Missouri AG Eric Schmitt and Louisiana AG Jeff Landry for working to obtain these documents. I will continue fighting to protect my rights and the rights of all Americans to speak their minds and ask tough questions.”

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Chris Hedges: Ukraine & the Politics of Permanent War

The U.S. is well on its way to becoming a corporate, military, and intelligence junta, with political front people in the presidency and congress. From Chris Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked and silenced for threatening the public’s quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged and the nation is disemboweled. 

“War Inc.” – by Mr. Fish.

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.

On Aug. 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require congressional approval.

Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.

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United Nations Penalizes Criticisms Against Elitist Takeover, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

The main problem our would-be rulers have with conspiracy theories is that so many of them turn out to be right. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

  • Coordinated censorship is occurring globally
  • In response to the growing truth movement that warns against a totalitarian, tyrannical takeover, the United Nations has now declared war on “conspiracy theories” that suggest world governments are anything but honest and ethical, and have published a comprehensive guide on how to debunk and strike down claims to the contrary. According to the U.N., world events are “not secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent”
  • According to the U.N., a story only qualifies as truthful if “The sources are backed by fact-checking sites” — which we now know are all bought and paid for by the cabal that is conspiring to create a One World Government through a “Great Reset”
  • To stop the spread of “conspiracy theories” about a global technocratic cabal hell-bent on stealing all private wealth and centralizing world governance, UNESCO, the European Commission and the World Jewish Congress have launched a joint Twitter campaign with the hashtag, #ThinkBeforeSharing
  • Documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL) show the U.S. government colluded with Big Tech to censor on its behalf
  • The Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana have filed a lawsuit against the federal government and have been granted discovery. Several officials from the Biden administration are being subpoenaed, as are several social media companies. The documents obtained by AFL are also being used in this lawsuit. Subsequent to the AFL’s document release, several scientists who were censored by Big Tech at the behest of the federal government have joined the AG’s lawsuit

There’s clear coordination, globally, of censorship. With few exceptions, countries have taken action to criminalize free speech, and they have done so in lockstep with each other. It began in earnest with censorship of theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and grew from there to include anything COVID related.

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The Horrendous Damage of Censorship, by Todd Hayen

When people are not free to speak they are not free to think. From Todd Hayen at off-guardian.org:

There has always been a hunger for new discoveries and revelations of the truth, but often, in the past, it took great effort to get past the “agenda”—there has always been one.

Think of the Daniel Ellsberg exposure of The Pentagon Papers as well as many pieces coming out of Viet Nam during the ‘60s by a group of idealist journalists covering the war there. None of these were popular publications with the editors (or the powers that be), and had their difficulty getting published, but they were not altogether censored.

Then jump a few decades ahead and think of Julian Assange, still being held against his will for his revealing publications in WikiLeaks on war crimes committed by the United States. And we certainly must not forget the courageous work of Edward Snowden who exposed illegal CIA surveillance in the summer of 2013 having The Guardian, in the UK, and The Washington Post, in the US, publish his story.

Again, although unusual considering today’s climate that his story was published in two particularly prominent instruments of the state, Snowden himself was declared an alleged traitor by the US and has dodged extradition to this day. The screws tightened as the years rolled by—now so tight practically nothing gets through.

There is a lot more than this, of course. And today the censoring of highly qualified professionals and journalists who have pertinent and quite important information to share with the public has become so blatant it brings to mind the Nazi book burnings of the 1930’s and Soviet censorship during Stalin’s reign as General Secretary of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953.

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Three Illuminating Quotes About The War In Ukraine, by Caitlin Johnstone

Well, if nothing else, this war has given us still more censorship and repression, and as an added bonus, the threat of nuclear war. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:

“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”

~ John Pilger

This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.

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Democrats and Republicans Have One Thing in Common: Both Suck on Free Speech, by Matt Taibbi

Censorship is one of many things both parties agree on. The only difference is who they think should be censored. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, announced a major, $75 million campaign to boost free expression today. The move places the longtime agitator against campus speech codes in a role historically occupied by the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU. Since its founding 1920, but particularly since its famed 1976 defense of neo-Nazi marchers in Skokie, Illinois, the ACLU has been a face of American liberalism, but shifted in recent years as its once-definitional issue, free speech, is increasingly cast out of the Democratic Party mainstream.

FIRE’s expansion is great news for speech advocates, but likely wouldn’t have been necessary had attitudes toward speech not changed dramatically among liberal academics and among the ACLU’s primary donors, traditional Democrats. Moreover it’s not as simple as free speech moving now from being a blue value to a red one. What’s actually happened is far worse: tossed overboard by the blues, speech has been left without a consistent, principled champion on either side of the political aisle, as both parties have doubled or tripled down on the most idiotic forms of censorship lately, albeit in different ways.

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Letter to US Legislators: #DefundTheThoughtPolice, by Margaret Anna Alice

No society in which the government has any role in deciding what can and cannot be said, written, and disseminated can call itself free. From Margaret Anna Alice at margaretannaalice.substack.com:

“In 1946 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution reading in part, ‘freedom of information is a fundamental human right, and the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated.’ This is our touchstone as well. This is the code of the Voice of America. We welcome the view of others. We seek a free flow of information across national boundaries and oceans, across iron curtains and stone walls. We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

—President John F. Kennedy, Address on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America, February 26, 1962

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

—CIA Director William Casey, February 1981

I am calling on you to reject S.3737 (Promoting Public Health Information Act introduced by Senators Ben Ray Luján and Chris Murphy) and every other instrument of censorship under consideration now and in the future.

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Get Ready to Be Muzzled: The Coming War on So-Called Hate Speech, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

What is hate speech? Any speech those in power hate. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech.”—Benjamin Franklin

Beware of those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech.

Especially be on your guard when the reasons given for limiting your freedoms end up expanding the government’s powers.

In the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, NY, carried out by an 18-year-old gunman in military gear allegedly motivated by fears that the white race is in danger of being replaced, there have been renewed calls for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online.

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

All of these measures play into the government’s hands.

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Western Civilization Is Being Organized Around Winning US Infowars, by Caitlin Johnstone

What joy the survivors of nuclear holocaust will know when they realize their side’s propaganda won. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The US-centralized empire’s use of propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation is the single most urgent issue of our time, because it’s what prevents attention from being drawn to all other issues. And all signs indicate it’s set to get much, much worse.

I feel the need to reiterate once again that the censorship we’re seeing about Ukraine is of a whole new kind than anything we’ve seen before. There’s no pretense that it’s done to save lives or protect democracy this time around, it’s just “We need to control the thoughts that people think about this war.”

Once it was accepted that disinformation and misinformation must be curtailed from above, government and tech institutions took that as license to decide what’s true and false on our behalf. We know this because now they’re just openly propagandizing and censoring us about a war.

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