Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald Discuss Censorship and Meaning

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I've listened to this podcast several times. It's long, but it is extremely thoughtful, engaging, disturbing, but also hopeful and celebratory of the human spirit. It involves Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald. These are two of my most cherished thinkers. I am inspired and provoked by many of the topics that they explore here. Topics include censorship, propaganda, the history of these things in the United States. Also, the relationship between religion and politics, and what goes wrong when religion is absorbed into politics. And there's even some meaning of life moments. I took the time to transcribe a large chunk of this discussion, and I am sharing it with the hope that those of you who listen to it or read it will also find it worthwhile.

I asked Grok to crank out a basic table of contents to this interview:

Min 21:30

1. Censorship of RFK Jr. by Google and the tactic of starting with hated figures like Alex Jones

2. Expansion of censorship to mainstream voices, including Devin Nunes and Rand Paul

3. Reasons for increasing censorship: Generational shifts in values among Millennials and Gen Z, and the impact of Trump's election

4. Depiction of Trump as an existential evil justifying extreme measures, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Sam Harris's views

5. Connection to post-9/11 clampdown on civil liberties, transformation of airports into authoritarian spaces

Min 27:35

6. Reflections on 9/11 trauma, the war on terror, and how airport security conditioned obedience to authority

7. Threats to liberty from fear rather than greed; free speech as equivalent to free thought and essential for adaptation

8. George Orwell on tyranny through mind control; the internet's shift from liberation to control, Snowden revelations

9. Biblical phrase "render unto Caesar"; collapse of religious domain into politics leading to unsophisticated good vs. evil wars

10. Personal background on religion; hubris in censorship; human need for spirituality, politics as a substitute for religion

11. Discussions with Douglas Murray on humanism needing a religious framework; Carl Jung on rationality bounded by the dream

12. Grappling with ethics and morality without religion; necessity of spirituality to avoid nihilism

13. Response to materialist atheists; human relationship with the larger whole; introduction to the story of Abraham

These excerpts start at Minute 21:30 of the above video. Glenn Greenwald 20% of Democratic Party voters say they intend to vote for RFK, Jr. for president. And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google sweeps in and says, This is something that you are not permitted to be heard. Glenn Greenwald And what happened was, what always is the tactic of sensors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent, simply because their emotions for that person are so high. So the first person to really be deplatformed in this collusive effort by Silicon Valley was Alex Jones. And Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook at the time. Mark Andreessen in Silicon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said, no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly, or maybe not even so slowly, to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably think shouldn't be censored. And by the point that you cheer the precedent in the first instance, because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities, it will be too late the precedent is already implemented, and then you're left to just bicker about its application, rather than the principle itself. Glenn Greenwald And that's precisely what has happened. They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices. Devin Nunes went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well. One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists who were testifying before the US Senate about the possible efficacy of ivermectin and other alternative medication for covid. It was a Senate hearing, a hearing in the United States Senate. Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as a excerpt of this hearing, and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well.

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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:

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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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