I founded this website in 2006 primarily as my way of documenting my journey, my attempt to make sense of things around me. I’ve always tried to get things right, but that doesn’t always work out. Looking back, I’ve found more than a few articles on this site where modern-day me disagrees with the me of the past. There is no way to get everything right, because truth-seeking is a never-ending task. 90% of the recipe is not giving up, staying in the game, not falling prey to tribal impulses.
We live in a tribal world, however. A world were powerful tribal forces are concocted not only organically, but by large media operations, often working in concert with the U.S. government, including the U.S. security state. Many people scoff that that. They are fish who fantasize that they are totally free, not constrained by the water in which they swim.
Many of the people I formerly spent a lot of time with have remained fully immersed in the left-leaning corporate news ecosystem. They grew up with the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN and NPR. They have trusted these news sources for many years and they continue to trust them because they see FOX as the only alternative. They have been convinced by corporate media that they must avoid all independent journalists. Most of them think they are already well informed, but they have a one-sided understanding of many salient issues of the day, including censorship and warmongering, issues the democrats of ten years ago opposed, but now they largely favor.
How could that be? If you ask them, they have no answer for why they have flipped 180 degrees over the last ten years. They cannot point to any new evidence that explains their enthusiasm for supporting the war, including the war in Ukraine. It was so utterly strange how so many of them got quiet about the war in the Ukraine as soon as the U.S. turned its military might from Ukraine to Israel. How was it that so many of those gold and blue flags quietly disappeared from social media and front porches, without explanation?
Many of these same people, formerly ferocious opponents of censorship, now advocate for censorship. So much so that many of them deny the existence of the Censorship Industrial Complex, despite abundant evidence from the Twitter Files. Michael Shellenberger recently posted this graph on Twitter. Notice how Democrats have become big advocates for censorship:
Most people I know are intentionally and proudly ignorant of the decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Missouri v. Biden. They are sure they don’t need to know anything about this decision even though they no almost nothing about it. They run away when I try to tell them about these dystopian findings by the Fifth Circuit:
The Individual Plaintiffs have not sought to invalidate social-media companies’ censorship policies. Rather, they asked the district court to restrain the officials from unlawfully interfering with the social-media companies’ independent application of their content-moderation policies….The Plaintiffs allege that federal officials ran afoul of the First Amendment by coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech],” including by “threats of adverse government action” like antitrust enforcement and legal reforms. We agree…
We find that the White House, acting in concert with the Surgeon General’s office, likely (1) coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences, and (2) significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment…
Generally speaking, officials from the White House and the Surgeon General’s office had extensive, organized communications with platforms. They met regularly, traded information and reports, and worked together on a wide range of efforts. That working relationship was, at times, sweeping. Still, those facts alone likely are not problematic from a First-Amendment perspective. But, the relationship between the officials and the platforms went beyond that. In their communications with the platforms, the officials went beyond advocating for policies … or making no-strings-attached requests to moderate content …Their interaction was “something more.”
We start with coercion. On multiple occasions, the officials coerced the platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to moderate content. Privately, the officials were not shy in their requests they asked the platforms to remove posts “ASAP” and accounts “immediately,” and to “slow[]down” or “demote[]” content. In doing so, the officials were persistent and angry. Cf. Bantam Books, 372 U.S. at 62–63. When the platforms did not comply, officials followed up by asking why posts were “still up,” stating (1) “how does something like [this] happen,” (2) “what good is” flagging if it did not result in content moderation, (3) “I don’t know why you guys can’t figure this out,” and (4) “you are hiding the ball,” while demanding “assurances” that posts were being taken down. And, more importantly, the officials threatened—both expressly and implicitly—to retaliate against inaction. Officials threw out the prospect of legal reforms and enforcement actions while subtly insinuating it would be in the platforms’ best interests to comply. As one official put it, “removing bad information” is “one of the easy, low-bar things you guys [can] do to make people like me”—that is, White House officials—“think you’re taking action.”
That alone may be enough for us to find coercion. Like in Bantam Books, the officials here set about to force the platforms to remove metaphorical books from their shelves. It is uncontested that, between the White House and the Surgeon General’s office, government officials asked the platforms to remove undesirable posts and users from their platforms, sent follow-up messages of condemnation when they did not, and publicly called on the platforms to act. When the officials’ demands were not met, the platforms received promises of legal regime changes, enforcement actions, and other unspoken threats. That was likely coercive…
We also find that the FBI likely significantly encouraged the platforms to moderate content by entangling themselves in the platforms’ decisionmaking processes…. Beyond taking down posts, the platforms also changed their terms of service in concert with recommendations from the FBI. For example, several platforms “adjusted” their moderation policies to capture “hack-and-leak” content after the FBI asked them to do so (and followed up on that request). Consequently, when the platforms subsequently moderated content that violated their newly modified terms of service (e.g., the results of hack-and-leaks), they did not do so via independent standards…. Instead, those decisions were made subject to commandeered moderation policies. In short, when the platforms acted, they did so in response to the FBI’s inherent authority and based on internal policies influenced by FBI officials. Taking those facts together, we find the platforms’ decisions were significantly encouraged and coerced by the FBI…
[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.”
State v. Biden, 80 F.4th 641, 653 (5th Cir.), opinion withdrawn and superseded on reh’g, 83 F.4th 350 (5th Cir. 2023), cert. granted sub nom. Murthy v. Missouri, 144 S. Ct. 7 (2023). The case now scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court
How is it possible that millions of intelligent Americans yawn about this evidence of ubiquitous censorship? How is it possible that they don’t care that their government is dictating what citizens can and cannot say to each other? If the First Amendment is no longer important to them, what is it that they celebrating on the Fourth of July?
It has become clear to me that the censorship has completely convinced many people that one side of the story–the side told by left-leaning corporate media–is the full story. This has happened on issue after issue, not just on warmongering and censorship. Millions of Americans have become so absolutely reliant on left-leaning corporate media that they are convince that any information contrary to their trusted information is misguided, corrupted or even evil. When I suggest to friends that there are other facts they might want to consider, they more often than not look at me with suspicion or even hostility. I’m not alone in struggling to talk with formerly close friends. On a recent interview with Russell Brand, Steve Kirsch spoke of his loss of friends over the past few years:
Russell Brand
And it seems to me that to address this issue would take what kind of machine other than mass popular uprising could ever bring about the reckoning that’s required? If what you are saying is true, Steve, what would be required? Do? How are you maintaining your optimism? What are your next steps? And what are your personal fears? And what resources do you have to continue to operate at this level, when it’s likely that the consequences will be quite serious?
Steve Kirsch:
Yeah. So I, I think that what’s going on is most people are believing the so called experts. And like, you know, our friends, for example, I’d say we lost 98% of our friends, because they think I’m mistaken. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not qualified and so forth. And so anybody who opposes this narrative is putting the same sort of situation I am. And it you know, I talked to a Silicon Valley, chief executive that I know and I said, I said, Hey, what are you doing nowadays? I told him what I was doing nowadays? And I said, Do you want to talk about it? And he said, No, it’d be like, if you were to come to me and said, the moon is made of Swiss cheese, I wouldn’t want to talk to you about it. And so that’s what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with people who believe that anybody who opposes what the Harvard professors say what the CDC says, and what the FDA says, is, is wrong. And that’s just not the case, people need to hear both sides. And they’re not hearing both sides, the media is only covering one side of the story, they never allow any kind of dissent. To come out. And of course, the censorship of, you know, is just huge.
Brett Weinstein also spoke of this challenge on a November 5, 2023 episode featuring Joshua Slocum:
I’ve now been through several of these events in my own life. And I’ve noticed a pattern, which is that in every case, these divisive crises reveal people’s character. And each time I’ve seen the same pattern: there are people you thought you could trust who absolutely disappoint you. And then there are people that you never expected, maybe you didn’t even know them ahead of time, who rise to the challenge and they shine. And you see that somebody, maybe you didn’t know their name, but they turn out to have tremendous strength of character and insight, and they stand up at the right moment and defend you for no reason. Right? No reason other than that it’s the right thing to do. And so each time I have lost friends, and it’s painful. And I have gained people who are much higher quality. And I call this “painful upgrade,” Right? It keeps upgrading your social circle. And I now have to look back on the world. Before I had been through any of these and realized that I was walking around with trust in people that carried with them the ability to absolutely betray under the worst possible circumstances, and that that’s dangerous. You are far better to know who actually has the strength of character to face these things. And to limit your significant interactions to that pool of people. Right? It is a gift to know who cannot be trusted with your well being. And I don’t like to say that, but I think people need to be alerted to this. Because, you know, people are not labeled. They don’t even know themselves whether they’re capable of this until they’re faced with the situation. It’s the crisis that reveals it. And it’s the silver lining of these terrible chapters that it does tell you who’s really on your team.
This is not the first time I’ve lost friends because it has become too difficult to discuss certain topics. Religion was crammed down my throat throughout my childhood. It was a long-term trauma for me and it ruined my relationship with my well-meaning father. The fact that I was not religious made me the target of suspicion for many other people throughout my life. That I experienced so much rejection as a result of my carefully considered sincere beliefs is probably why it is relatively easy for me to recognize what is happening to so many of my friends.
I’ll stop with this sad thought: The Censorship Industrial Complex (so carefully and bravely investigated and described by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Russell Brand and Glenn Greenwald) is a vast system in which well-paid and (mostly) well-meaning bureaucrats divide us from each other ideologically. But it is also a system that is ruining untold friendships. In the aggregate, it is destroying a sense of community–and even the possibility of community–for many of us.
