Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a plaintiff in the case of Murthy v Missouri (pending before the U.S. Supreme Court), a man who was censored by a highly coordinated group of organizations financed and instigated by the U.S. Government, notices a purported news organization applauding censorship (of X, run by Elon Musk):
Matt Taibbi is flummoxed. So am I. Any curious person would be. Matt tries to explain what happened in he recent article: "A Saturday Massacre in CongressOn a Saturday to mark and remember, congress funds two wars and hands the intelligence agencies sweeping new surveillance power, getting nothing in return."
Please. Someone tell me who is moving the levers of power in DC and how? Matt Taibbi offers this:
Mike Johnson is now Winston Churchill. All he had to do was give the NSA unlimited spying power, overrule constituents about funding two wars, and support allowing government to block a platform used by 60 million Americans.
In return he got: nothing. No immigration reform, no articulation of benchmarks or a plan for success in Ukraine, no accounting for past spending, no insistence on warrants to spy on Americans, no concession that FISA can only be reauthorized by Congress, no claw-back of a major new “Everybody is a Spy” surveillance ask. Johnson traded his starting lineup for the proverbial bag of balls.
History will look back at a moment below from April 12th, just before the House passed FISA, and wonder about a last comment from Johnson. The Speaker talks about being originally horrified by the “terrible abuses, hundreds of thousands of abuses” of FISA by the FBI.
But “then when I became Speaker, I went to the [secure briefing room] and got a confidential briefing” from intelligence officials, and heard “sort of the other perspective on that.” It “gave him a different perspective.”
Regarding FISA, Reason explains what was at stake in an article titled "Revised Section 702 Surveillance Authority Poses More Danger Than EverNew language could make almost anybody with access to a WiFi router help the government snoop."If this became law, millions of American small business owners would have a legal obligation to hand over data that runs through their equipment," caution former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D–Colo.), both now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. "And when they're done with doing their part in mass surveillance, these small businesses would then be placed under a gag order to hide their activities from their customers."
It seems like Glenn Greenwald is thinking more bad things are happening than he is willing to articulate at this time. Consider this part of Glenn's monologue: [More . . . ]
Fear is a market. To instill fear in people also has advantages. Not only in terms of drug use. Anxiety-driven people are easier to rule.
-Gerd Gogerenzer, Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Educational Research (Torsten Engelbrecht, Virus Mania, 2021)
I've been struggling to understand why it is that "The Blob" (or, as Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have termed it, the "censorship-industrial complex") tolerates and even seems to embrace so many flavors of woke dogma. Many of these woke position are outright oxymorons. Here are a few examples:
Carefully- gathered statistics (e.g., regarding police/race) are racist. And see here for many statistics that are inconvenient to the "abolish the police" insanity.
The Rule of Law is unfair, even racist/colonial/white supremacist etc.
Enlightenment Principles, including free speech, have become barriers to progress. See here for my articles on free speech.
Intelligence Tests (modern versions, which are highly predictive, as much as any other aspect of psychology, as well as very carefully designed to be race-neutral) are "racist."
Allowing high schoolers to take advanced math courses is racist. To preserve "equity" we must not allow such classes in high school.
I have written about all of these pronouncements at DI. I have also written repeatedly about immense pressures to conform to particular unwarranted, nonsensical and incurious narratives (see more than 250 of my articles that I have tagged as "narratives in media"), especially by corporate media outlets (which I am increasingly thinking of as government propaganda (often CIA) outlets--See Dick Russel's "Belly of the Beast" two-part article here and here. It is guaranteed to ruin your week--it can be painful when scales fall from your eyes).
My understanding from the sordid marriage between multinational corporations, U.S. foreign policy, government censorship and CIA dirty tricks is those with great economic and political power want more and more. They are never satisfied. But why allow woke ideology or even push it on us? What does that have to do with money or power? For that, consider the quote at the beginning of this article. When those around us utter palpable bullshit, it makes us anxious, even when we know that it is bullshit (see here). It makes us stay indoors. It causes us to avoid going to school board meetings. It keeps us from speaking up at the workplace or even at family dinners. We know woke ideology makes no sense, but most of us are willing to do a LOT of work to keep others from disliking us, even if they are saying things that we know, for sure, make no sense. Even if we know that they are saying and believing these things due to a vast censorship effort funded and operated by our own government. Even if we are certain that the corporate media consensus is a false consensus enabled by a highly sophisticated government apparatus.
Hearing nonsensical things being uttered around us by family, friends and co-workers who rely on corporate media makes us anxious. In the long run, this anxiety makes us more obedient.
This leaves us with two paths in life.
#1: Run out to get yet another COVID booster, then go home to watch Disney and eat ice cream;
#2: Keep speaking up. When you hear nonsense, call it nonsense. You might be worried that if you say what you believe out loud, people will yell at you and call you names. That will, indeed, happen. But remember, for every ignorant loud mouth in the room, you have become a hero to 9 anxious and silent people who are sitting on their hands. Your job is to inspire those people to be heroes next time.
It was totally predictable that the corporate media (mainstream media or MSM) is trying to pretend that there is nothing to see about recent revelations about Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR. They are pretending her illiberal woke-drenched ideology has no relevance to the illiberal woke-drenched ideology of the modern version of NPR. Andrew Sullivan also noticed this cover-up in his recent link-rich article*:
I used to be quite fond of NPR. Each time I’d tune in, I’d be treated to calm, reassuring voices, occasional folk music and high-minded liberalism. Yes, it was biased — but in a tolerable, occasionally hilarious way, still relaying facts about the world, occasionally even letting an always-qualified “conservative” voice on its airwaves. Yes, we used to refer to “All Things Considered” as “All Things Distorted,” but it was a tease, not an indictment.
And so when I read the NYT story about the new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, being criticized for past tweets that were “embracing liberal causes,” it felt like a blast of ‘90s nostalgia. Who running the MSM doesn’t “embrace liberal causes”? Ditto the WSJ’s description: that the tweets “indicate liberal leanings.” Or the Washington Post, which wrote that Maher’s tweets included calling Tump a “deranged racist” and a photo of her “wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris.”
Nothing to see here. Nothing new. Just a liberal CEO getting blasted by a far-right activist (in this case, Chris Rufo), after an NPR stalwart, Uri Berliner, wrote a public critique of NPR. A tale as old as the MSM.
But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”
Sullivan also noticed that substantial drop-off in NPR audience since 2017, from 11M to about 8M. I'm not in a mood to hear about correlation and causation on these numbers . . .
The CEO of NPR was previously the executive director of (the now severely compromised, though still somewhat useful) Wikipedia. Katherine Maher's admission is an important data point--we don't usually get it so clearly from the top in their own words. One after another, our most important sense-making institutions in the United States have abandoned their primary missions, incentivized by tax-funded government cut-outs. Their leadership has become power-mad, narcissistic and arrogant. They see you as a child and they are your self-appointed nanny. It is totalitarianism wrapped in well-coifed elitism. Their vision clashes with the vision of the Founders of this country.