What Else Isn’t True?

What else did we think we knew for decades that now turns out to be bullshit? The the most important lessons we are being taught over the past five years are A) the inextricably fraught relationship between knowledge and power and B) the critical need to be courageous and skeptical whenever we try to make sense of the things of the world in order to swat away the oftentimes insidious power of tribalism.

Steven Pinker:

Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity.

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Barack Obama Openly Advocates for Censorship by the Elites to Help the Unwashed Masses

Obama is clearly advocating the need for censorship in this video:

Part of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts and separate facts from opinion. We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts. That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government regulatory constraints…

I'll paraphrase: "We," (the pre-ordained elites) will be in charge of what you can say and hear. We're helping you and you need our help because you're too dumb to think for yourself. You'll love it!

This is no one-off for Obama. Despite being a former professor of law, who taught constitutional law, Obama considers himself one of the elite leaders of the censorship industrial complex.  Consider this brand new article by Michael Shellenberger: "Obama-Linked Stanford Center Held Secret Meeting With Foreign Governments To Plot Global Internet Censorship: Top EU, UK, Brazil, and Australian officials met in September with US censorship advocates to combine and coordinate efforts." Excerpt:

In the spring of 2022, former President Barack Obama gave a major policy address at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, where he laid out a sweeping proposal for government censorship of social media platforms through the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Six days later, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to serve as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth with the clear goal of controlling the information Americans could access online.

At the heart of Obama’s vision for Internet censorship was legislation that would have authorized the US government’s National Science Foundation to authorize and fund supposedly independent NGOs to censor the Internet. The DHS and Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, pioneered this censorship-by-proxy strategy as a way to get around the First Amendment in 2020 with posts raising concerns about the 2020 elections and in 2021 with “narratives” expressing concern about the Covid vaccine.

The 2024 election of President Donald Trump significantly reduced the threat of Obama, DHS, and NSF censoring the American people. Trump defunded much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. The Platform Accountability Act is going nowhere in Congress.

To be fair, Trump is no saint on free speech. As FIRE's Will Creely testified recently, Trump has been bludgeoning numerous entities to curtail free speech:

To be sure, the government may speak for itself, and the public has an interest in hearing from it. But it may not wield that power to censor. As Judge Richard Posner put it: The government is “entitled to what it wants to say — but only within limits.” Under no circumstances may our public servants “employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens.”

So the law is clear: Government actors cannot silence a speaker by threatening “we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,” as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission did last month. Nevertheless, recent examples of jawboning abound: against private broadcasters, private universities, private social media platforms, and more. The First Amendment does not abide mob tactics.

Democrats, however, are more on board with Obama's approach to censorship than republicans:

[More ...]

Continue ReadingBarack Obama Openly Advocates for Censorship by the Elites to Help the Unwashed Masses

Sheep Handling During Covid

Post by Harry Fisher, reporting on a 2020 Yale Study. Excerpt:

[R]esearchers at Yale decided to find out what kind of psychological manipulation worked best to get people to take the COVID shot. They didn’t study medicine, they studied obedience.

[R]esearchers at Yale decided to find out what kind of psychological manipulation worked best to get people to take the COVID shot. They didn’t study medicine, they studied obedience.

The researchers split people into groups and bombarded them with different emotional triggers. One message told people to think of vaccination as a “moral duty to protect others.” Another said that refusing the shot wasn’t brave but “reckless.” Others used guilt and shame, “How would you feel if you got someone sick?” or “Imagine how embarrassed you’ll be if you spread the virus because you refused.”

Then they measured which message made people cave fastest. Which one made them not only say, “Yes, I’ll get the vaccine,” but also, “I’ll pressure my friends to do it too.”

The results were exactly what you’d expect, the messages that made people feel guilty, ashamed, or afraid of being judged were the most “successful.” The study admits that those messages stirred people to persuade others and to judge anyone who declined as ignorant or selfish. In other words, they found the recipe for social coercion, and called it “science.”

This research wasn’t about understanding, it was about control. It created the tone that dominated those years, the moral superiority of the compliant and the public humiliation of the skeptical. What we lived through wasn’t spontaneous mass hysteria. It was engineered with precision, it was tested, measured, and rolled out.

We were never “informed.” We were handled.

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Mike Benz Describes the Challenges of Dismantling Joe Biden’s Censorship-Industrial Complex

Because they cling to corporate media as their main source of “the news,” many of the most vocal people online don’t realize that the Biden Administration poured billions of tax dollars into censoring and propagandizing Americans. Nor do they know the details. This secret operation was so vast and so ghastly that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded:

[T]he Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life. Therefore, the district court was correct in its assessment—“unrelenting pressure” from certain government officials likely “had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.” We see no error or abuse of discretion in that finding.

Who were the recipients of this tax money? Answer: Numerous government agencies, including DHS and USAID (and many others), who funneled the money out to dozens and dozens of NGO and non-profits with disarmingly patriotic names (e.g., Global Engagement Center and the National Science Foundation) who did the dirty work, often in close coordination with prestigious American universities. They worked in tandem with each other and with the CIA, which continued to make good use of all of its favorite Project Mockingbird techniques to convince you to be someone else. Many of the doubters don’t know CIA history. They don’t know that the CIA has topple dozens of governments Or they assume that the CIA used to be bad but they somehow got to be the good guys when after they displayed animus against Trump.

This censorship-industrial complex (also sometimes referred to as “the Blob”) has convinced you that you were well-informed and that you were thinking your own thoughts. They made sure you only heard one version of every story so that you voted only for the “correct” candidate. They were so good at their jobs that you believed that virus particles couldn’t pour through cloth masks. They made sure that you slurped up every government-approved position and that you deep-down hated those who disagreed with you, including your friends and family members.

[More below, including the transcript of Mike Benz' entire talk at NatCon

Continue ReadingMike Benz Describes the Challenges of Dismantling Joe Biden’s Censorship-Industrial Complex