Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Comments on Jimmy Dore's segment featuring Peter McCullough, et al.
You will not find one word about this completely redacted CDC report from NYT, CNN, WaPo, NPR or MSNBC.
Matt Taibbi, in his latest, "Maintain Your Brain," at Racket News:
I started to worry over what looked like the removal of multiple lanes from the Information Superhighway. Wikipedia rules tightened. Google search results seemed like the digital equivalent of a magician forcing cards on consumers. In my case, content would often not even reach people who’d registered as social media followers just to receive those alerts.
I was convinced the issue was political. There was clear evidence of damage to the left and right independents from companies like NewsGuard, or the ideologically-driven algorithms behind Google or Amazon ad programs, to deduce the game was rigged to give unearned market advantages to corporate players. The story I couldn’t shake involved video shooter Jon Farina, whose footage was on seemingly every cable channel after J6, but which he himself was barred from monetizing...
We’re entering a stage of history where, like the underground resistance in Bradbury’s book, we’ll have to build some consciousness as a movement to save the human mind. Because thinking for oneself has already been denounced as a forbidden or transgressive activity in so many different places (from campuses to newsrooms and beyond), it’s probably already true that membership in certain heterodox online communities is enough to put a person on lists of undesirables.
Twenty-five years ago, most of us thought it would be a great idea to digitize everything and connect it to everything else. It was a great idea. My most recent moment of demoralization: now that everything is digitized and connected, it gives too much power to anyone who can manage to control it all. To open the gates to some and close them to others. It wasn't so terrible when their were hundreds of media outlets, but that's not the case any more. Worse yet, a lot of the censoring is being don surreptitiously (e.g., shadow-banning, stealth editing and outright censoring). Increasing numbers of us are getting the sense that we are yelling into the void. I just don't know the extent of it. I don't know who is in charge. I don't know where this is leading, but if they can do this to Matt Taibbi, they can easily do it to small fish like me.
Matt urges: "We’ll eventually want to get to know each other a little more, be a little more interactive." I think that is the right approach, living and interacting significantly more locally, which will make it more difficult for power-hungry others, especially when well-intentioned (Mike Benz calls it "The Blob"; Brett Weinstein refers to this somewhat coordinated effort as "Goliath"), to intervene, to pit us against each other, to make us disappear, to generate yet another false consensus . . . .
And this is how the world goes around. Apple has been publicly exposed as a censor in a big way. Stewart, no longer working for Apple, is now free to talk about the problem. Matt Stoller reports:
During the interview with [FTC Chair Lina Khan], [Jon Stewart] said that Apple had blocked him from interviewing her while he was at Apple. "They literally said, please don't talk to her,” he offered.... It’s a wide-ranging interview, in which Khan and Stewart discuss everything from inhalers to antitrust to big tech. And it’s worth watching. But the key moment was when Stewart asked Khan why Apple would do something like that. And she responded, “I think it just shows one of the dangers of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.”
That is the right analysis. It’s well-known that Apple bars TV producers on its streaming service from commenting on China. When I was in Hollywood last year, censorship on behalf of China by all the streamers, especially Apple, was a constant complaint. There are obvious reasons, as Apple is de facto controlled by the Chinese government.
I don't know who this is, but this gentleman exhibits incredible composure while being arrested:
The above tweet was posted by Mike Benz, who has become a hero to me based upon his encyclopedic coverage of the military-censorship-industrial complex. Mike, a former State Department official, is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He is incredibly brave based on the monied and powerful people he is angering. If you want to know how bad things are getting for those of use who still believe in the First Amendment, watch and learn:
Probably the best place to start is this one-hour synopsis by Mike Benz that is equally brilliant and horrifying:
Here's an excerpt from the above one-hour interview (Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz):
Tucker Carlson: You're not describing democracy. You're describing a country in which democracy is impossible.
Mike Benz: What I'm essentially describing is military rule. I mean, what's happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. You know, democracy sort of draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is ruled by consent of the people being ruled that is, it's not really being ruled by an overlord, because the government is actually just our will expressed by our consent with who we vote for. The whole push after the 2016 election and after Brexit, and after a couple of other, you know, social media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted, like the 2016 Philippines Election, was to completely invert everything that we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is, we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. And who are the the democratic institutions? Oh, it's us. You know, it's the military. It's NATO. It's the IMF and the World Bank. It's the mainstream media. It is the NGOs and oh of course, these NGOs are largely state department funded, or IC funded. It's essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you're left with is essentially, democracy is just the consensus building architecture within the within the democratic institutions themselves.
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