Tag Archives: censorship

America’s Intellectual No-Fly Zone, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on April 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, there’s only one acceptable opinion about the Ukraine-Russia war. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

From left to right, from Chomsky to Carlson, war-skeptical voices are being denounced at levels not seen since Iraq

In a 1979 essay called, “My Speech to the Graduates,” Woody Allen wrote:

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Allen was satirizing the notion that there are always good choices in life. Often, there aren’t. Sometimes the fork in the road ahead asks you to choose between different routes to hell. The late, great Gilbert Gottfried once made the same point in a standup routine about stranded missionaries just slightly less subtle than Allen’s bit.

Indomitable public intellectual Noam Chomsky gave an interview to Current Affairs last week called, “How to Prevent World War III.” Regarding Ukraine, Chomsky revisited “My Speech to the Graduates”:

There are two options with regard to Ukraine. As we know, one option is a negotiated settlement, which will offer Putin an escape, an ugly settlement. Is it within reach? We don’t know; you can only find out by trying and we’re refusing to try. But that’s one option. The other option is to make it explicit and clear to Putin and the small circle of men around him that you have no escape, you’re going to go to a war crimes trial no matter what you do. Boris Johnson just reiterated this: sanctions will go on no matter what you do. What does that mean? It means go ahead and obliterate Ukraine and go on to lay the basis for a terminal war.

Those are the two options: and we’re picking the second and praising ourselves for heroism and doing it: fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.

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Twitter faces the ‘nightmare’ of being forced into free speech, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on April 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Twitter board opens itself up to legal action if it scotches Tusk’s takeover bid without seriously considering it. From Jonathan Turley at thehill.com:

Twitter’s board of directors gathered this week to sign what sounds like a suicide pact. It unanimously voted to swallow a “poison pill” to tank the value of the social media giant’s shares rather than allow billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company.

The move is one way to fend off hostile takeovers, but what is different in this case is the added source of the hostility: Twitter and many liberals are apoplectic over Musk’s call for free speech protections on the site.

Company boards have a fiduciary duty to do what is best for shareholders, which usually is measured in share values. Twitter has long done the opposite. It has virtually written off many conservatives — and a large portion of its prospective market — with years of arbitrary censorship of dissenting views on everything from gender identity to global warming, election fraud and the pandemic. Most recently, Twitter suspended a group, Libs of Tik Tok, for “hateful conduct.” The conduct? Reposting what liberals have said about themselves.

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Bonfire of the Governments, Part Two, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 23, 2022 | 24 comments

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Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Part One

Think of an activity that’s essential for a government bent on subjugation: censorship and the suppression of expression. Governments on both sides of the present conflict have further jacked up their efforts to control expression from the plateau reached with Covid. Russia just passed a law imposing a 15-year prison sentence for anyone spreading “fake news” about its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and European governments and lapdog legacy and social media have blanketed populaces with official propaganda. Just as with Covid, questions and deviations from the approved narrative are stifled, censored, and punished.

It was all so much easier back in the post World War II, pre-internet good old days. In the U.S. and Europe, there were several “papers of record” that had been infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and state-licensed radio and television stations. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t even that, just a few official propaganda organs.

Yet even with that degree of control, government repression wasn’t wholly effective. In the U.S. the truth got out about the Vietnam War. The Soviets could stop everything but people talking with each other, albeit in hushed tones. The cynical humor became legendary. (“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”) Humor always contains an element of truth, which is why statists can’t do humor. The number of citizens red-pilled to Soviet corruption and incompetence and the comparative freedom and wealth of the West reached critical mass and the government fell. It took way too long, but it happened.

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Today, there are billions of potential journalists and video producers—anyone with a cell phone and access to the internet—and trillions of text and email communications. People still occasionally engage in face-to-face conversations. The infrastructure needed to monitor all this is complex, gargantuan, and costly. Only algorithms and artificial intelligence can sort through it to identify threats to the state. Once identified, a separate infrastructure is necessary to apprehend, arrest, process, incarcerate and perhaps execute those engaged in wrongthought, wrongspeak, wrongwrite, and wrongact.

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Orwell Was Right, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on March 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Somehow the human brain adjusts to telling endless lies and adjusting to blatant contradictions. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

From free speech to “spheres of influence” to our passion for endless war, we’ve become the doublethinkers 1984 predicted

This weekend I re-read 1984, a book I tend to reach for when I get Defcon-1 depressed about the state of the world. Deep in the novel, Winston ponders the intricacies of doublethink:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… that was the ultimate subtlety.

In the last weeks, Russia took an already exacting speech environment to new extremes. A law was passed that would impose 15-year prison sentences for anyone spreading “fake news” about the Ukraine invasion; access was cut to Facebook and Twitter; stations like Echo Moskvi and TV Rain as well as BBC Russia, Radio Liberty, the New Times, Deutsche Welle, Doxa, and Latvia-based Meduza were effectively shut down; Wikipedia was threatened with a block over its invasion page; and national authorities have appeared to step in to prevent coverage of soldiers killed in the war, requiring local outlets to use terms like “special operation” instead. The latter development is connected to the state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, issuing a remarkably desperate dictum requiring news outlets to “use information and data received by them only from official Russian sources.”

Russia also appears in the middle of a general crackdown on local media, not so much because those outlets are dissenting, but because they’re more likely to provide indirect evidence of war failures or the effect of sanctions. The desperation to control news has grown to the point where Russian diplomats in foreign countries are pressuring state outlets in countries like Iran to stop using the term “war” to describe what’s going on in Ukraine.

On the flip side, a slew of actions have been taken to crack down on “fake news” and “misinformation” in the West. The big one was the European Union banning RT and Sputnik:

Twitter avatar for @googleeuropeGoogle Europe @googleeurope

Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we’re blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik across Europe, effective immediately. It’ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action.

March 1st 2022

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Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube also cut access to all Russian state media, because the EU sanctions also required that internet platforms delist any RT or Sputnik content, even from individuals. The statute reads, “As regards the posts made by individuals that reproduce the content of RT and Sputnik, those posts shall not be published, and if published, shall be deleted.”

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The Power of Propaganda: State Control of the Press and Media Will Be the Death Knell of Freedom, by Gary D. Barnett

Posted on March 4, 2022 | 1 comment

Around the globe, state control of the media keeps tightening. There is not a single nation that’s going the other way. From Gary D. Barnett at lewrockwell.com:

“Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else’s game.”

~ Evita Ochel

Once again, black is white and white is black. We are all living in a state-created inversion. The press, as has been noted in this country and others since the beginning, was charged with the noble role of informing the people about what is actually going on around them. The freedom of the press has been lauded as necessary for any free society to exist. America’s own so-called ‘Bill of Rights’ in the first amendment states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, but all government ‘guarantees,’ as has been exposed, are as worthless as the paper on which they are printed. If all this is true, then why is the entirety of all mainstream and major press and media so corrupt, dishonest, colluding, state-supporting, evil, and essentially controlled by the CIA? Why are virtually all ‘news’ reporting entities owned by the same small group of individuals and companies, or the state itself? Why is most all the ‘reporting’ just propaganda, regardless of the venue?

The only sane position to take in this day and age is to understand that every word coming from the whores in the press, the politicians, and the media are absolute lies. Everything should be considered a falsehood, and should be ignored until and unless it is completely verified and supported by fact.

We are living in madness; we are living in total absurdity. There is no other way to explain our current situation. So why does the bulk of society, not just in this country, but around the world, still cling to every word coming from the state and its minions in the press and media? Why do people believe whatever they are told to believe, without the benefit of any facts or logic; even to the point of voluntarily destroying their own life’s work, their families and loved ones, their communities, and their very souls? Can this ever be legitimately explained?

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Defending Freedom And Democracy Sure Requires An Awful Lot Of Censorship, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

But wait, if you’re censoring people, aren’t you taking away their freedom? Why yes you are, but taking away freedom is required to preserve it. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

Kremlin-backed media outlets have been banned throughout the European Union, both on television and on apps and online platforms. RT has lost its Sky TV slot in the UK, where the outlet is also blocked on YouTube. Australian TV providers SBS and Foxtel have dropped RT, and the federal government is putting pressure on social media platforms to block Russian media in Australia.

In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Latvia, speaking in support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine will get you years in prison.

Twitter, historically the last of the major online platforms to jump on any new internet censorship escalation, is now actively minimizing the number of people who see Russian media content, saying that it is “reducing the content’s visibility” and “taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter”. This censorship-by-algorithm tactic is exactly what I speculated might emerge after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey resigned back in November, due to previous comments supportive of that practice by his successor Parag Agrawal.

Twitter is also placing warnings labels on all Russia-backed media and delivering a pop-up message informing you that you are committing wrongthink if you try to share or even ‘like’ a post linking to such outlets on the platform. It has also placed the label “Russia state-affiliated media” on every tweet made by the personal accounts of employees of those platforms, baselessly giving the impression that the dissident opinions tweeted by those accounts are paid Kremlin content and not simply their own legitimate perspectives. Some are complaining that this new label has led to online harassment amid the post-9/11-like anti-Russia hysteria that’s currently turning western brains into clam chowder.

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The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West, Glenn Greenwald

Posted on February 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

Glenn Greenwald is certainly not the first to point out the fascism of the anti-fascists. From Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.
Police in Canada deployed to dislodge the final truckers and protesters from downtown Ottawa, aimed at bringing an end to three weeks of demonstrations over Covid-19 health rules. (Photo by Dave Chan / AFP) (Photo by DAVE CHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

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A New Global Attack to Censor Me, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on February 8, 2022 | 1 comment

Joseph Mercola joins the legions of establishment persona non grata flocking to Substack. From Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

Well, that didn’t take long! Mere weeks after my announcement that I was reintroducing my deleted article archives and moving them to the Substack Library for paid subscribers, the mainstream press started calling on Substack to censor and cull vaccine critics from its platform.

There are very good reasons why my content has moved to Substack under a Private Membership Agreement. All proceeds will be donated to our nonprofits, just like the profits from my book — there is no financial motivation for doing this. The reasons for doing this will be revealed in due time.

To their credit, Substack CEO Chris Best and his two cofounders have brushed off calls for censorship, saying that allowing “the presence of writers with whom we strongly disagree” is a “necessary precondition for creating more trust in the information ecosystem as a whole,”1 and that:

“We believe that critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities.”2

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Leftists Use Mass Censorship Because They Don’t Have The Guts To Engage In Fair Debate, by Brandon Smith

Posted on February 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

Leftists don’t have the guts and they don’t have the arguments. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:

Why is censorship the go-to tactic for leftists? Well, if you ask them they won’t deny their love affair with the memory hole. In fact, most leftists will vehemently defend censorship as absolutely moral and for the “greater good.” Their position is basically this: We live in a “society”, and some ideas, thoughts and words are “dangerous” and destructive to that society. Therefore, those ideas and words must be eliminated from open discussion so they can protect society from itself.

But who gets to decide which ideas are dangerous and destructive? It’s rather convenient that the political left has anointed themselves the pure and objective arbiters of our culture. Purity within leftist groups is measured by expressions of “empathy” (virtue signaling). They are the thought police because, somehow, they believe they are the most empathetic.

True empathy is of course impossible to measure in another human being. You could very well be dealing with a narcissist or psychopath that is very good at pretending they care and have a conscience. They might say all the right things and have all the right opinions in public, but in their private lives they are malicious and take pleasure in causing pain in others. Humans are utterly fallible, which is why all systems of freedom seek to decentralize power through checks and balances and avoid mass censorship. All systems that value freedom and peace seek to eliminate the existence of thought police.

Leftists (and globalists) have sought to circumvent checks and balances as well as free speech protections through a number of tactics. In much of the western world they pay lip service to free speech rights when it is convenient for them, but most European nations and countries like Australia have NO legitimate constitutional measures that restrict governments from easily initiating speech suppression laws whenever they want. The draconian restrictions put in place over covid have proven this beyond a doubt.

This is what makes the US so unique as a culture, and it is the reason why leftists have pursued other methods to silence dissent.

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The Folly of Pandemic Censorship, by Matt Taibbi

Posted on January 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

When you censor information, people increasingly question the truthfulness of the information they’re allowed to receive. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:

As the latest anti-Substack campaign shows, more and more people are forgetting why free speech works

Earlier this week, in the latest in a series of scolding campaigns, a Britain-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate gave a sneak peek at a research report on Substack to The Guardian and The Washington Post. Both outlets came out with their scare pieces this morning. From The Guardian:

A group of vaccine-skeptic writers are generating revenues of at least $2.5m (£1.85m) a year from publishing newsletters for tens of thousands of followers on the online publishing platform Substack, according to new research…

Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said companies like Substack were under “no obligation” to amplify vaccine skepticism and make money from it. “They could just say no…”

The Post, citing “some misinformation experts” — the pandemic version of “people familiar with the matter” — added:

These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints — potentially making the services less responsible for spreading harmful views, some misinformation experts say.

If these stories sound familiar, it’s because this same Center for Countering Digital Hate two years ago tried to pull the same stunt with The Federalist, using NBC to ask Google to crack down on them. Humorously, and typically — this happens a lot with these stories — that effort ended in fiasco. The piece NBC ended up writing boasting of the success of its “Verification Unit” in getting the site demonetized, entitled, “Google bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles,” turned out to itself be misinformation. The Federalist was never banned, only warned, and the issue was its comments section, not its articles. Google had to issue a statement:

Twitter avatar for @Google_CommsGoogle Communications @Google_Comms

The Federalist was never demonetized.

June 16th 2020

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