The Connection Between the War in Ukraine and the U.S. Censorship industrial Complex

You have a choice. One option is to follow the dictates of the U.S. warmongering uniparty, who tells you, "Putin is bad. So shut the fuck up and support our policy of endless treasury-draining war. Or you could listen to Mike Benz, Executive Director of Foundation for Freedom Online.

Mike discussed Ukraine and U.S. censorship recently on Twitter. I created a transcript of his conversation with Win Marshall:

Win Marshall

Do you not think America should have supported Ukraine in the war?

Mike Benz

It's good question. It's strange for-- You know, if I'm hesitating, it's because to answer that question, there are so many layers that come before it that I haven't even really honestly had to think about where I actually fall on the underlying issue, because the process is so corrupted. And we lived through Russiagate, this thing where anybody who supported a detente with Russia was it was effectively deemed to be a Putin puppet, and then you could launch a federal investigation. You could bring in indictments and domestic spycraft on, you know, Trump's whole campaign, because of his policy of neutrality, with with Russia effectively, or his NATO skepticism. They were able to argue, you know, that he was effectively a Russian puppet, and so they spied on his campaign.

Win Marshall

These things are happening today in Britain with Nigel Farage, and he's been called a Putin apologist. I think it's continuation

Mike Benz

It's the same thing. And so I think the way I would answer the question is: if you took the gun off of my head, where the state, the regime, the NGOs, the cutouts, the media, the lawyers, the federal investigators, all said, "Hey, you know what? If you have your own opinion on the Ukraine war, I'll put the gun down." Then maybe I'd think about and say, Okay, well maybe we can now talk about whether or not it actually redounds to US interests to try to secure these $12.4 trillion in the natural resources, whether it redounds to our benefit to have this elaborate CIA State Department operation to kill Gazprom and pry all the profits off with this endogenous, you know, Ukraine Petro industry and lifeline by all these US oil and gas companies and British companies like Shell. Maybe. But the answer is a hard no while they still have a gun to my head, because you can't, you can't do that.

Win Marshall

Okay, so let's say there's no gun to a head.

Mike Benz

That feels like a hypothetical that is kind of irresponsible for me to indulge in because there is a gun to my head. The censorship industry grew out of Ukraine. That whole infrastructure of censorship that Americans live under and inherited during the 2016 presidential election cycle came from the 2014 US-UK overthrow of the Ukrainian-democratically elected government. When, when we orchestrated that coup, when the head of the US Embassy was personally handing out cookies and water bottles to the January 6 style protesters surrounding the parliament building, pumping them full of money, when our own senators like John McCain were there on the ground calling for a transition of the government, when we overthrew that government and then did not expect the blowback, did not expect the counter coup.

When the entire eastern side of Ukraine broke away and declared itself a breakaway state in 2014 and when Crimea voted in its referendum to formally join the Russian Federation, this set off a total crisis across NATO and called for a fundamental reimagining of how NATO understood warfare. This gave rise to something which I've talked a lot about. You know, first was called the Gerasimov doctrine. Then it was called hybrid warfare, and now it's sort of called sharp power. But it was essentially this idea that NATO could no longer just be a military alliance. It had to expand its mandate, and this is a direct quote from Jen stellenberg, from tanks to tweets. The reason that we lost in Ukraine was because we lost the information war. We lost to Russian propaganda, infecting the mines of Ukrainians. And it was Russian propaganda who was infecting the mines of Germans, because at the time the German AFD party was on the rise. They were running on restoring gas relations with Russia, because they were mostly a sort of working class, sort of like Trump, Trumpism. They were running on, sort of because these sanctions that the US State Department and UK Foreign Office effectively imposed on all these different other European countries, after Crimea, to sanction Russian gas, which was the cheapest gas.

The alternative was LNG liquefied natural gas harvested in Houston, liquefy ship 5000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. You know, de-liquefied in ports in Portugal or in through the Baltic strait into Poland. You know, de-liquefied transported. That's orders of magnitude more expensive than Russia, which means the industries suffer, which means the middle class suffers. The welfare safety net suffers. So AFD was running on restoring gas relations with Russia. Marine. Le Pen was was running on the same from from France. So is the Vox party in Spain.

And so NATO is saying, Oh, my God, these right wing populist parties are all running on this economic nationalist what's best for us. Don't care what the US or UK says about, you know, being a good Global Citizen and sanctioning Russia, we want to do what's economically best for our own middle class citizens. And so our intelligence State, the trans military alliance of NATO, at that point in 2014 declared this hybrid warfare doctrine. Said war is actually not about tanks anymore. It's about tweets. It's about control over social media. Because we lost to Russia without Russia firing a bullet, Crimea voted itself to join the Russian Federation. It's the same thing as if they had rolled into Crimea with tanks and submarines, they now control it because of the referendum of the people.

Well, where are they getting their information?

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More Jawboning Unearthed by Congressional Committee

If government-aligned activists wanted to win all of the arguments of the day, one way would be to prevent those with opposing viewpoints from promulgating them. New disclosures show that NGOs aligned with the federal government are enthusiastically engaging in this cancel culture on a widespread basis. Ben Shapiro lays out this cancellation strategy in a series of tweets:

What part does the federal government play in this?

Continue ReadingMore Jawboning Unearthed by Congressional Committee

Meanwhile, Librarians at Public Libraries Work Overtime to Protect Us from Harmful Books

As reported by FAIR, in "All Is Not Quiet In the Library Catalogs: Navigating the changing landscape of library cataloging":

Traditional cataloging practice requires the cataloger to describe the book as objectively as possible; there are even specific guidelines reminding catalogers not to select subject headings (those hyperlinked topic descriptors in the record) based on their own values and beliefs. One of the first questions I was asked in my hiring interview was to confirm that I would agree to catalog materials that I, personally, found offensive. After all, libraries—and, by extension, catalogers—are supposed to be guardians of free speech and intellectual freedom. We do not know who will be looking for the materials and for what purpose, and so we have to be fair, accurate, and objective in order to make it easier for the material to be found. But it seems that now the overriding duty of the cataloger is to protect the patrons from the harm that the records (not even the materials!) may cause them.

In the discussions I mentioned above, fellow catalogers were unabashedly stating that certain marginalized groups should get to decide how a book should be labeled. If a cataloger who is a member of a marginalized social group believes the book in question is harmful or offensive, he is fully in the right to add a note in the catalog stating his beliefs. Thus we now have four books in the international catalog (used by libraries worldwide) with the label “Transphobic works”. Several books that are critical of the current gender affirmation care model now have the subject heading “Transphobia”. These books are not about transphobia, so the subject heading is likely being used as a way to warn the reader of the record (and potentially the librarian choosing which books to order for the library) that these are “bad books” and should not be read or purchased.

Continue ReadingMeanwhile, Librarians at Public Libraries Work Overtime to Protect Us from Harmful Books

Republicans Rethink the Benefits of Censorship

Congressional Democrats are still the all-star censorship team, but Matt Taibbi points out that two-faced Republicans are working hard to try to play catch-up. The title to his article is "More Republicans Betray Causes They Supported Ten Minutes AgoThe Great Bipartisan Constitution-shredding project of 2024 continues at breakneck speed."

Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms.

Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing to out-censor the censors. Between renewal of FISA surveillance, the depressingly bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and now a proposed No Fly List for campus protesters, most all of congress apart from a few libertarian holdouts is signed up for the project of turning War on Terror machinery inward. Not exactly the surprise of the century, but still, sheesh.

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Chris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets

What can we tell about NPR CEO Katherine Maher based on a review of her tweets?  Chris Rufo notes that she has tweeted more than 29,000 times. He has found a few themes:

What you notice first about Maher’s public speech are the buzzwords and phrases: “structural privilege,” “epistemic emergency,” “transit justice,” “non-binary people,” “late-stage capitalism,” “cis white mobility privilege,” “the politics of representation,” “folx.” She supported Black Lives Matter from its earliest days. She compares driving cars with smoking cigarettes. She is very concerned about “toxic masculinity.”

On every topic, Maher adopts the fashionable language of left-wing academic theory and uses it as social currency, even when her efforts veer into self-parody. She never explains, never provides new interpretation—she just repeats the phrases, in search of affirmation and, when the time is right, a promotion.

Maher understands the game: America’s elite institutions reward loyalty to the narrative. Those who repeat the words move up; those who don’t move out.

This is the person in charge of NPR. As you can see from Rufo's article, she has also taken a hard stand in favor of censorship.

As CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maher made censorship a critical part of her policy, under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.”

Rufo's article is titled, "Quotations from Chairman MaherNPR’s new CEO exemplifies the ideological capture of America’s institutions."

Continue ReadingChris Rufo Assembles Profile of NPR CEO Katherine Maher Based on her thousands of Tweets