Political Outcome of Censorship

America is going to hell, and it is going Greyhound. Many of us have been shouting to the rooftops that the uniparty system we have disguised as a two party system is destroying our country. Both sides seem to be ignoring reason. Make no mistake, the two party system is a puppet of a more powerful force. If you cannot read this with an open mind, if you insist that Biden or Trump is our savior, you needn’t even read this. I have noticed people on both sides of the aisle being totally dismissive of anything the other side has to say, on a level that offends and frightens the hell out of me. You also need not read this if you believe that ANY of the large corporate news organizations are feeding you truth. You will simply believe all the fact checkers that you happen to listen to, and I am finding that facts are becoming awfully hard to come by. Lastly, if you honestly believe that the current efforts to mold a new world order are good for people, you need not read this either. While I agree in principle that the genie is out of the bottle as far as global trade, global communication, global influence, I also believe that the hegemony that is attempting to actually RULE the world is evil. But they have not won yet. Their desperation proves the point. But they may. Likely my own feeble efforts to warn you will go unheard. But I will still take my shot in the dark, and the globalists are, in fact, to blame. They give democracy a bad name. After all those words, if you are still patient enough to read…..let’s begin.

There will be three points I want to make, and none of them are going to be easy. In order to reduce the censorship I am bound to face, I will deliberately keep the second and third point to myself until I write further posts. The first point is that we are being censored. I have three points to make about censorship. 1) In an Orwellian twist, we have established what is essentially a Ministry of Truth that censors what we say. 2) The rhetoric that online censorship is instituted by private companies is a red herring of the grossest order. The United States government is in fact the captain of the Ministry of Truth. 3) No one is safe from the Ministry of Truth.

Censorship is Essential to the Preservation of Democracy

Take a look at this video. Go ahead, don’t be afraid. Yes, I know, one of the candidate’s names is on it. I promise I am not trying to get you to vote for him. Unless some strange miracle happens where God commands me to do so I am not voting for him. But you NEED to see this if you care AT ALL about truth, objectivity, freedom or liberty. You won’t melt, and while it may help my case, by itself it proves…well…watch it and see what it proves. If you have seen it before, please don’t dismiss this. Watch it, and then read what I have to say.

The sad truth is that the very censorship I am condemning is going to make it difficult to document the censorship that is out there.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

There was a time when free speech was an arm of the military industrial complex. Not so much that they actually allowed it or valued it, but it was a big selling point. America had the moral high ground. So it was in the interest of the Juggernaut corporations and the shadow lords of the alphabet soup bureaucracies to at least give the charade that it existed. I do (possibly foolishly) believe that at one time we actually DID have freedom of speech. I think in my youth, in the 80s, there was quite a lot of freedom of speech. There were some limits, and it is debatable how free we really were. But I never really felt truly afraid of what was happening until recently. The internet became a thing, and it seemed as though freedom of speech was not only an American thing, it was the value that would free the entire world. Russians were posting web sites (and still do….ironically I can find Russian web sites protesting Putin more easily than I can find American websites protesting…the topic which shall not be named in this post for fear of censorship…..(I know, it is cryptic. But I mean it. I don’t want to be canceled until I have written the last post). America was the Queen of Freedom, and with the internet (we always liked to claim we invented it, but CERN also claims to have invented it) spreading world wide, it was only a matter of time before freedom rang on every shore. We would evolve into a world where people were no longer afraid of tyranny. We could speak our minds and believe what we wanted and form communities, if only on the internet, of like minded people that would blend into a global melting pot of liberty.

Around 2010 or 2011, all of that changed.

One of the key elements of both spreading and coordinating the Arab Spring was social media. Suddenly, the elites were terrified. Even though we have been manipulating regime changes for seventy years or more, when the people started to do it themselves the military industrial complex went nuts. Ideas had become weapons. Democracy no longer meant rule by the people. It meant rule by the institutions of Democracy.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/did-pentagon-help-suppress-arab-spring/

“As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively. It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military bases and brokering weapons sales and transfers to despots from Bahrain to Yemen.

‘As state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there. During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations—skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings.’

https://archive.org/details/hackers-wars

“Excerpt on Orientalism and the Arab Spring: “The field of Middle Eastern studies has a long history of speaking for Middle Easterners, going back centuries to when it was referred to as Oriental Studies. This role of Western participation in Middle Eastern affairs is part of what Edward Said defined as Orientalism in the West. From Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,- about a young Irish boy who acts as a spy by disguising himself in the garb and languages of various Indian ethnicities and religions,- to Anglo actors in black face portraying Othello, to T.E. Lawrence’s legacy as Lawrence of Arabia, the idea of representing the Orient has fascinated “bright young Westerners”.  The introduction of technology into this long-standing Orientalist trend has enabled new generations and larger numbers of Westerners to represent the East for Easterners. After all, “social media, by its very nature, is only an extension of the social context in which it operates.”  And the unusually high level of participation displayed by foreigners in the Arab Spring who otherwise do not concern themselves with events in the Middle East demands explanation. In this work, I suggest that multiple avenues available to “bright young Westerners” to represent Orientals are used today to reorganize the Middle East in accordance with US policy objectives. On the deliberate side of this Orientalist policymaking are wargames – wargames (دوريات)  in which US intel-security roleplay and strategize as Middle Eastern regimes. Secondarily, unwitting Westerners (so-called “useful idiots” in intelligence parlance) assume the Internet proxies and even political voices of Middle Easterners, as happened in the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab Spring of 2011. “

“Original Terminology: “The VNN effect is the use of wargames/scenario-based media to set policy agendas, impede opposing agendas, and push decision-makers into action. ‘VNN’ is taken from the name of the mock news channel used in disaster scenario trainings by FEMA. While the CNN effect is understood to be the use of authentic news stories to alter policy agenda and action, by terming this phenomenon ‘the VNN effect’, I trace the media used under CNN effect conditions to their wargame/scenario origins. The media used in the VNN effect are based on speculative fiction by policy and military industries, unlike media used to create the CNN effect, which are understood to be true but promoted for political purposes.  Like the CNN effect, the VNN effect is used to propel nations into war. 

“In the VNN Effect, it is further shown that media are regularly used, without the informed consent of the public, as The Public Space for the manipulative wargaming of real-life situations and crises.” 

In the interests of fairness, the Arab Spring seems to have had a positive impact on only one nation, that of Tunisia. Otherwise the correlations have been at best a null much ado about nothing, and at worst, led to less democracy, a lower standard of living, increased unemployment, increased jailing of journalists, massive Syrian displacements of population, increased government crackdowns on the internet (except in Tunisia), increased government corruption.

https://www.cfr.org/article/arab-spring-ten-years-whats-legacy-uprisings

Gerasimov Doctrine

One of the theories that was at least partially influenced by the Arab Spring was the Gerasimov Doctrine. And what, pray tell, is that you say? I will be citing armyupress:

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20160228_art009.pdf

He predicted that the U.S. government, going forward, was going to drastically change their strategy for regime change in order to counteract the forces that had come into play in the Arab Spring. “Instead of an overt…invasion, the first volleys of a U.S. attack come from the installment of a political opposition through state propaganda (e.g., CNN, BBC) the Internet and social media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).”

The article continues: “After successfully instilling political dissent, separatism, and/or social strife, the legitimate government has increasing difficulty maintaining order. As the security situation deteriorates, separatist movements can be stoked and strengthened, and undeclared special operations, conventional, and private military forces (defense contractors) can be introduced to battle the government and cause further havoc.” As tensions rise in the State that the U.S. alphabet soup have pronounced doom upon, the “government is forced to use increasingly aggressive
methods to maintain order, the United States gains a pretext for the imposition of economic and political sanctions, and sometimes even military sanctions such
as no-fly zones, to tie the hands of the besieged governments and promote further dissent.

The article continues: “Eventually, as the government collapses and anarchy results, military forces under the guise of peacekeepers can then be employed to pacify the area, if desired, and a new government that is friendly to the United States and the West can be installed.

Ok, so some Rusky general wants to accuse America of internet skull duggery with the aim of taking down regimes we don’t like. But Russia is the enemy, of course they are going to paint us as the bad guys. I mean, after all, they are the ones who bought Donald Trump, right?

I may deal with the Trump thing some other post, but I don’t want to get distracted now. This is what this is all about. The government has coopted the largest social media platforms for its own ends. Don’t believe me?

Read Them and Weep

For a long time I have been feeling like a noose is tightening around our freedom of speech. I think I can name two or three friends who believe I am full of bull. And so, for a long time I have hesitated to revisit this topic. I wrote about this in an earlier blog post, but it received very few views. I don’t want to be too angsty or to alienate my more liberal friends, but I felt strongly that the right wingers in my circle appreciated the article far more than people on other points of the spectrum. And I wondered if maybe I was just crazy. Maybe there was something I was missing. I will leave a link to that post here. If you wish, please read it and let me know if you believe I knew what I was talking about then, or not. And just for grins and giggles, I will leave a few links to other posts of mine that vaguely relate to free speech.

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/325

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/358

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/413

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/413

So we have a documented fear of the Arab Spring. We have a Russian general calling out the United States military (right or wrong) as being in control of the Western Media outlets. And then we have the very controversial revelations that were uncovered after  “CEO Elon Musk gave Twitter documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.”

Again, people on the left completely disregard these files (except for Russel Brand). People on the right are happy to pounce on them as proof that there is a liberal bias that is censoring people. Let’s take at least a quick look at these files and see what we can find out.

“But Twitter was more like a partner to government.

“With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police:

Some of this honestly seems legit to me. Likely the big tech corporations did need, and frankly likely desired some some information, if not actual guidance, with handling Iranian, Venezuelan, and North Korean social media posts. Part of me feels that true freedom of speech means there should be minimal interference with any speech that isn’t criminal i.e. child porn, criminal/mafia communications to perform violent crimes, communications of actual physical threats to people over the internet. Having said that….why discuss FBI posturing. According to https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ the definition of posturing is “behavior or speech that is intended to attract attention and interest, or to make people believe something that is not true.” Obviously this was not intended to attract attention, they have done all they could to belie that this has been happening. Is it possible, then, that the FBI is trying to use social media platforms to make us believe things that are not true?

The Twitter Files continue: “By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” 

In case you think it is only Biden who is guilty here:

Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However: 

“11. This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D000067113“

Taibbi, who was quoted as saying when conservative Andrew Breitbart died “”Good! Fuck him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.” He wrote that the obituary was “at least half an homage“, which gave respect to aspects of Breitbart’s style and also alluded to Breitbart’s own derisive obituary of Ted Kennedy. In a postscript, Taibbi wrote that some fans of Breitbart were angered by the obituary and responded with “threats and insults”.^[55] Quote from Wikipedia.

I point this out to share that Taibbi points out the extreme Democrat slant at Twitter, and he documents this by comparing political contributions from Twitter: in 2018 Twitter donated $11,100 to Republican candidates, $295,722 to Democrats. It grew more, not less pronounced with time. In 2020 Republican contributions were $14,137, Democrat $909,431. And in 2022, before Musk bought out Twitter, Democrat candidates received $165,969 from Twitter, Republicans….a whopping $451.

“On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad

Remember, an election was going on. And whatever you may think of Trump or January 6….all of that was in the future. There was at this time no “insurrection” to justify one sided protections of ANY political candidate. The Twitter Files continues: “Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.”

In the eyes of these partisan technocrats, the story of the lap top getting out to the public was dangerous on the same level as child pornography getting released. Do you agree? Let me know if you do.

The Twitter Files continues: “White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”

Donald Trump’s team sent a scathing email relaying they were upset. Whether you take his side or not…do you blame him? Blocking this story was the height of unfairness. Please explain to me how anything Trump did before January 6 justifies blocking the story? Or please explain to me why Biden is so wonderful that we should ignore this story. I’m fine with you supporting him or voting for him. But turning a blind eye to the truth is neither going to earn my vote, nor my respect.

There are internal emails relaying that there were people on the comms/policy teams who challenged this decision. The justification put forth by the safety/trust teams was “the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy.” There were quite a few employees who didn’t buy this excuse. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” The debate when on at the higher levels. Good to know there are some Democrats with some intellectual honesty. “Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” Nor were Twitter execs the only Democrats who expressed concern: “In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to (Twitter executive) Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.” What follows is a curious back and forth of emails where a Democrat congress woman is trying to speak up for free speech, only to get form letter techno babble responses that all of this is in “Twitter’s policy, please refer to our website.” It never entered this yes-man’s mind that the First Amendment was at stake.

The net result? Since Twitter didn’t have the common sense to know when to moderate dangerous speech and a legitimate story, they brought in the big guns. “Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.” 

The result of this survey? “”THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE”

I’ve made at least the beginning of my case, albeit likely in a pretty disjointed fashion.

And I am having trouble saving this post. I wonder why….