Brits and Biden Team up to Kill X (Twitter)

I just now posted this on FB, where most people are either A) Unenlightened about the importance of free speech, B) Completely captured by corporate news or C) Afraid to speak up about important issues of the day.

The DNC wants to prevent people like me from freely sharing ides with other users of X (Twitter). They are trying to deny me the right to speak freely with the people I want to interact with. Tomorrow they will be coming for you. I guarantee it. That is the repeated story of censorship. It is also the story of human arrogance and hubris. What's next? Are they about to start barring me from sharing information in my FB DMs? Nope, because they've Already done that. Maybe they'll start interrupting our phone calls to correct what we can say and hear, because use of social media is merely a larger scale version of that. How would you feel about that? How would you like to be censored/corrected/propagandized more than ever by the people who got almost EVERYTHING wrong about COVID? You're about to find out.

For more, see Matt Taibbi's latest article, "Election Exclusive: British Advisors to Kamala Harris Hope to "Kill Musk's Twitter": England, not Russia, is the culprit in a real foreign election interference story, as the leaked Stateside plans of an advisory group with close ties to Prime Minister Keir Starmer show."

For more, see Taibbi's full article at Racquet News. 

Continue ReadingBrits and Biden Team up to Kill X (Twitter)

Walter Kirn Ponders this Moment

Walter is an excellent writer and my respect for him has soared based on his weekly conversations with Matt Taibbi. His recent Tweet:

I've done all I could this year, and perhaps more than I should have, to clarify the issues before us and characterize the nature of our moment. I didn't do it for the money, and there hasn't been any. In fact, I lost some. Happily. My personal American dream involved becoming a writer and an artist, see, and expressing myself as well as I knew how and as freely as I dared. This year, for the first time in my life, I saw that the opportunity to chase this dream was gravely, gravely threatened, not just for me but for the kids and young people who are much like I was once, an odd little kid who was trying to find his voice. To keep this great road of possibility open seemed to me the highest mission I could assign myself. I did. It's been an adventure. And such a pleasure.

But now it's time for words to turn to action. It's time for us to protect what we hold dear. For me it is our right to speak, think, and create freely, without fear, or at least without fear from the authorities and the moneyed interests and powers that lie behind them.

I hope I've made a difference in this cause. I hope I've convinced some others to join me in it. And to act accordingly, democratically, as is our right and duty.

Continue ReadingWalter Kirn Ponders this Moment

Censors as Identity Thieves

These censors are insidiously injection-molding your brain. They are existential identity thieves--secretly derailing you, forbidding you from organically becoming the person you were meant to be. In the aggregate, what they are doing is akin to mass murder and the corporate media and the DNC are cheerleading them on. The censorship-industrial complex denies us our unalienable rights to our own Lives, our own Liberty and the Pursuit of our Own happiness. It is all so disgustingly anti-American.

Mike Benz:

I'm standing in front of the global capital of Internet censorship. This is the venture capital arm of the censorship industry. You see, we have a censorship industrial complex, but the heart of it is the industry, the money. That's what makes it work. That's how you get 10s of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Now, at this point, worldwide, full time professional sensors, whose job is to monitor social media, propose censorship solutions, implement censorship techniques, and all of it is funded by this building right here.

And I'm calling on speaker Mike Johnson, as soon as this election passes, should Republicans keep the house. I'm calling on you to set up a special subcommittee for protecting digital speech against government abuse, so that we have an institutionalized Gang of Eight who is capable of taking apart the censorship industry limb by limb, in terms of its government funding. Every single NGO. Every single university. Every single private sector, censorship mercenary firm. Every single fact checker. Every single media organization that's getting money from the National Science Foundation, the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy.

This building has allowed an octopus to grow, and I will tell you for having spoken to innumerable members of Congress who want to do the right thing. There are so many of these programs, and they go by so many different camouflage names. They're not called censorship grants and programs. They'll be called "digital resilience" or "media literacy," or "information integrity" or "countering disinformation."

But it's not countering it by counter-speech. It's censorship. It's remove, reduce, inform. Ban or suspend. Apply friction techniques like shadow ban, search recommendation bans, demonetization, virality circuit breakers or permanent fact check interstitials that are designed to kill virality and feed into the algorithm for deboosting. It's all censorship. It's all funded by the building behind me. And this can all be stopped, but we need eight educated members of Congress to man a panel to do investigations, subpoenas, transcribed interviews and hearings, and we need a brave Speaker of the House who's willing to set that up. Mike Johnson, I'm calling on you.

Continue ReadingCensors as Identity Thieves

American Universities as Black-Ops Leading the Way on Censorship

Mike Benz explains: At min 5, he pulls up USASpending.gov, which he describes as the only substantive difference between the U.S. and North Korea or China or Russia. All of these do less censorship than the U.S. At USASpending.gov, we can actually see what our government is paying to each university to do its censorship. Simply plug in "misinformation," then read and weep. "We don't have a fucking First Amendment anymore." The government merely pays our universities to do its censorship. "Funded by the underbutt of the Pentagon."

Continue ReadingAmerican Universities as Black-Ops Leading the Way on Censorship

Matt Taibbi’s Challenge to You

Matt Taibbi gave an extraordinary speech in DC this weekend. I invite everyone to watch his speech or read the transcript.

One of Matt's many quotable lines: "[The use of propaganda is] always someone trying to make you feel bad for their weakness, their mistakes. Don’t be ground down by it. Stand up straight and give it back."

I agree with every word of Tabbi's challenge. We need to speak up often and this includes repeatedly saying "no" to government overreach. When something big monied organizations tell us doesn't make sense, we need to stand up and say so, even when people (including friends and family) tell us we are bad for refusing to belief. Recently, Elites, including John Kerry and Bill Gates have disparaged our founding documents, the ones we purportedly celebrate on Fourth of July. They are now saying out loud that the First Amendment is a problem, rather than a brilliant proven solution to government overreach.

This tyranny and censorship we are facing are invisible to those who lap up their "news" from corporate media. "X" (Twitter) is where you need to go to get better information and alternate perspectives. It's far from perfect because X is a huge tent filled with many types of people, many of them severely wacky. X is also one of the few places where you can find thoughtful people freely conversing with each other, freely challenging the narrative that your government is spending untold millions of $ trying to force-feed you every day. Your own government thinks you aren't smart enough to think for yourself. It's minions talk down to you. They want to be your nanny. They want you get get in line and stop asking questions. They want you to shut the fuck up, even though they got almost EVERYTHING wrong about COVID. You'd think that they would instill some humility, but these are high paid elites who treasure their job security as much as they their conviction that they are so much god-damned smarter than the rest of us. They are close to having the power to intellectually blind and gag us on a scale that would have been unimaginable pre-internet. Truly, we need to stand up every day and say no to this.

Here's a longer excerpt from Taibbi's speech:

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they’re afraid of each other, but they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set — what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “Utopia of Scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy.” That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then “the devil’s music,” comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.

Because “freedom of speech” is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination — the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk scolded Elon Musk that “free speech is not a free pass” — it’s becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in “reputable” media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.

The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say . . .

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi’s Challenge to You