Michael Shellenberger offers an excellent summary of the nefarious conduct of the censorship industrial complex and lays out ties to some of its government funding sources. The people on FB who most need to understand this won't be able to. Their minds have been taken over and they fear information that challenges this propaganda.
Stunning information from Mike Benz, being interviewed by Joe Rogan. It was a long detailed interview that is extremely important for everyone to read. This is shocking, but we all knew that there was coordination in all of the "news outlets that have been marching in lockstep for the past five years to stamp out dissent, including stamping out true information that the government found to be inconvenient. I transcribed the portion of the interview provided in the following Tweet by KanekoaTheGreat. See below.
Mike BenzOn Internews, I've been talking about it for a long time, but now the stage is set to really show the extent of this. What we do is we create these pretty little predicates, these pretty little lie words, weasel words, to hide from the American people, and especially from foreign governments what we're really doing in the area. So we have a catchphrase at State and in state craft. It's called "independent media." You can think of that as the State Department's word for a good guy. Okay, doesn't mean independent. They are funded by us. They are not independent from the government. They literally submit their work and approval plans for their work plans, for what their cover, for review and approval to the US State Department. They are dog walked the whole way. But we call them independent because they are said to be independent from foreign governments who influence.
So basically, they're independent from the Chinese government, or they're independent from the Russian government. So there's just like with the word USAID itself that we talked about last time, it's your mind playing tricks on you. You're seeing "aid," but it's Agency for International Development. They do the same thing with independent media, which is that, internally to them, it means it's a good guy for us, because it's independent from our enemies, but when Americans see that, they think, well, "independent" that means it's a free actor who's not being sponsored by any government. But under the banner of USAID's independent media and media sustainability branches, we fund half a billion dollars a year to this network of, again, over 4000 media outlets. It reaches 778 million people, 9000 journalists "trained." Remember last time we went over the training? The Atlantic Council with seven CIA directors and annual funding from USAID as well as the State Department and pentagon, how they were holding up "I call BS" placards and putting Trump tweets on screen to flag for disinformation? If you remember, we went over that. Well, this is what training journalists looks like. Not only do they have the direct spawn of media octopus under their direct sub-grantee group, but they then go out and train the journalists who work at all the other ones who aren't directly sponsored. So they reach everywhere. And you'll see here, for example, it makes reference to to Jean Bourgault, who is making a half million dollars a year there. . . This has been going viral on X. I've been talking about USAID's role in the censorship industry forever. And if you look up, if you just look up "Internews," and you just plug in the name, you know, if you just copy paste that, you know, "Jean Bourgault" phrase, you'll see this in the video section, because it's everywhere now. She made speeches for a long time.
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Walter Kirn:
"In a way, censorship is just for the prisoners who've escaped the info dome. You know, censorship is just shooting the escapees but keeping people inside the dome and playing that 24 hour news act like music as maybe the main imperative. That is the part that I think will truly blow our minds."
Walter has perfectly expressed something that distresses me every hour of the waking day. There are vast numbers of people in the US who ingest only the high-calorie low nutrition version of information. I've referred to this type of "news" hundreds of times as "corporate news" or "legacy news," to distinguish it from the work of journalists who rely primarily upon the contributions of individuals who value the quality of the work. The legacy news includes five major players who I have often featured in my posts about the legacy media walking in lockstep to withhold information or to propagandize us. Once upon a time these outlets practiced something more akin to journalism, but we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears (I have posted hundreds of examples) that these outlets are no even trying to tell us what is going on around us, no longer offering conflicting perspectives, no longer putting their stories into historical perspectives and no longer pointing out the hypocrisy of public figures who make claims that conflict with their prior statements each day. Rather, in coordination with the U.S. government (and its many agencies, such as DHS, DOD, CIA as well as CIA's cutout USAID) our major news outlets work hard to convince consumers of pre-determined narratives--they write these plot first, then they go out to construct the facts. They do it like lawyers representing their clients in court--their is no attempt to be even-handed. In short, they engage in Censorship and Propaganda: The modern day versions of Scylla and Charybdis.
People who continue trust legacy news outlets have been convinced by these big corporate-monied narrative-purveyors that alternate opinions and dissident voices are radioactive. As they did throughout COVID, they argue that dissidents are far more nefarious than people, way worse than people you merely find disagreeable. Dissidents must be avoided at all costs because the dangers they pose with their facts and opinions are existentially dangerous. This way of promulgating news is a great danger. For example, by pounding a simplistic narrative about Ukraine-Russia, as many as one million people have died and the US Treasury funds have been diverted from helping Americans to going into a big black hole. As a result of stifling COVID dissidents, they got almost everything wrong (I found this on X recently:
Dozens of people with whom I once experienced mutual warm feelings have cooled. If we bump into each other, they look at me with suspicion. Some of them have accused me of being a Republican, even though my views are largely consistent with what I've always believed, including this: for the 40 years during which I voted almost entirely for Democrats. That said, I have spent my entire life declaring my independence from tribes, political, religious and otherwise. I'm proud of that and I have a lot of criticism for Republicans too, for instance the elimination of the CFPB. My acquaintances on the new Left tend to show intense unwillingness to consider alternative facts and opinions. They are locked down and in fetal position. This is not happenstance--this behavior is the result of one the tectonic plates underlying their media ecosystem. In earlier times, their information diet might have been more varied, but they are now victims of Stockholm Syndrome:
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As the USAID house of cards continues to collapse, Mike Benz responds to Alexander Vindman's whining:
On a light note, here are more (real) examples of USAID malfeasance:
More recent revelations:
- $1.5 million for DEI in Serbia
- $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland
- $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia
- $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru
This: "$15 million to George Soros's open foundation Over Obama's last four in office alone."
"Advertiser outreach" to censor news outlets.
Funding to thousands of journalists to shape the news.
Many people are assembling lists of USAID fraud. I can't vouch for all of this, but this is one of the many recent lists assembled by users on X:
Here's one more J.K. Rowling post dedicated to those people who sat on your hands while thousands of confused teenaged girls were being butchered and/or injected with hormones that would lead to their permanent sterilization. Moreover, as Rowling notes, there is the problem with luxury beliefs like this, benefitting only the elites. There's also the problem with the men who take advantage of vulnerable women. Rowling, who has been subjected to non-stop death threats for years, has this to say:
"This 'why do you care about a tiny fraction of the population?' line is, and always was, utterly ridiculous.Gender ideology has undermined freedom of speech, scientific truth, gay rights, and women's and girls' safety, privacy and dignity. It's also caused irreparable physical damage to vulnerable kids.
Nobody voted for it, the vast majority of people disagree with it, yet it has been imposed, top down, by politicians, healthcare bodies, academia, sections of the media, celebrities and even the police. Its activists have threatened and enacted violence on those who've dared oppose it. People have been defamed and discriminated against for questioning it. Jobs have been lost and lives have been ruined, all for the crime of knowing that sex is real and matters.
When the smoke clears, it will be only too evident that this was never about a so-called vulnerable minority, notwithstanding the fact that some very vulnerable people have been harmed. The power dynamics underpinning our society have been reinforced, not dismantled. The loudest voices throughout this entire fiasco have been people insulated from consequences by their wealth and/or status. They aren't likely to find themselves locked in a prison cell with a 6'4" rapist who's decided his name's now Dolores. They don't need state-funded rape crisis centres, nor do they ever frequent high street changing rooms. They simper from talk show sofas about those nasty far-right bigots who don't want penises swinging around the girls' showers, secure in the knowledge that their private pool remains the safe place it always was.
Those who've benefited most from gender identity ideology are men, both trans-identified and not. Some have been rewarded for having a cross-dressing kink by access to all spaces previously reserved for women. Others have parlayed their delicious new victim status into an excuse to threaten, assault and harass women. Non-trans-identified leftybros have found a magnificent platform from which to display their own impeccably progressive credentials, by jeering and sneering at the needs of women and girls, all while patting themselves on the back for giving away rights that aren't theirs.
The actual victims in this mess have been women and children, especially the most vulnerable, gay people who've resisted the movement and paid a horrible price, and regular people working in environments where one misplaced pronoun could see you vilified or constructively dismissed. Do not tell me this is about a tiny minority. This movement has impacted society in disastrous ways, and if you had any sense, you'd be quietly deleting every trace of activist mantras, ad hominem attacks, false equivalence and circular arguments from your X feeds, because the day is fast approaching when you'll want to pretend you always saw through the craziness and never believed it for a second."