Matt Taibbi’s Challenge to You

Matt Taibbi gave an extraordinary speech in DC this weekend. I invite everyone to watch his speech or read the transcript.

One of Matt's many quotable lines: "[The use of propaganda is] always someone trying to make you feel bad for their weakness, their mistakes. Don’t be ground down by it. Stand up straight and give it back."

I agree with every word of Tabbi's challenge. We need to speak up often and this includes repeatedly saying "no" to government overreach. When something big monied organizations tell us doesn't make sense, we need to stand up and say so, even when people (including friends and family) tell us we are bad for refusing to belief. Recently, Elites, including John Kerry and Bill Gates have disparaged our founding documents, the ones we purportedly celebrate on Fourth of July. They are now saying out loud that the First Amendment is a problem, rather than a brilliant proven solution to government overreach.

This tyranny and censorship we are facing are invisible to those who lap up their "news" from corporate media. "X" (Twitter) is where you need to go to get better information and alternate perspectives. It's far from perfect because X is a huge tent filled with many types of people, many of them severely wacky. X is also one of the few places where you can find thoughtful people freely conversing with each other, freely challenging the narrative that your government is spending untold millions of $ trying to force-feed you every day. Your own government thinks you aren't smart enough to think for yourself. It's minions talk down to you. They want to be your nanny. They want you get get in line and stop asking questions. They want you to shut the fuck up, even though they got almost EVERYTHING wrong about COVID. You'd think that they would instill some humility, but these are high paid elites who treasure their job security as much as they their conviction that they are so much god-damned smarter than the rest of us. They are close to having the power to intellectually blind and gag us on a scale that would have been unimaginable pre-internet. Truly, we need to stand up every day and say no to this.

Here's a longer excerpt from Taibbi's speech:

Let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class, from which the “anti-disinformation” complex comes. By the way: there are no working-class censors, poor censors, hungry censors. The dirty secret of “content moderation” everywhere is that it’s a tiny sliver of the educated rich correcting everyone else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it.

America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed behavior police.

In prerevolutionary France even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword duel to the death. Our aristocrats pee themselves at the sight of mean tweets. They have no honor, no belief, no poetry, art, or humor, no patriotism, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They’re simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.

They have one idea, not even an idea but a sensation: fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat; they’re afraid of each other, but they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set and live in near-constant fear of being caught having an original opinion. They believe in the manner of herd animals, who also live whole lives without knowing an anxiety-free minute: they believe things with blinding zeal until 51% change their minds, and then like deer the rest bolt in that direction. We saw that with the Biden is sharp as a tack/No, Biden must step aside for the Politics of Joy switch.

I grew up a liberal Democrat and can’t remember having even most of the same beliefs as my friends. Now, millions of alleged intellectuals claim identical beliefs about vast ranges of issues and this ludicrous mass delusion is the precondition for “disinformation studies,” really the highly unscientific science of punishing deviation from the uniform belief set — what another excommunicated liberal, my friend Thomas Frank, calls the “Utopia of Scolding.”

“Freedom of speech” is a beautiful phrase, strong, optimistic. It has a ring to it. But it’s being replaced in the discourse by “disinformation” and “misinformation,” words that aren’t beautiful but full of the small, pettifogging, bureaucratic anxiety of a familiar American villain: the busybody, the prohibitionist, the Nosey Parker, the snoop.

H.L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere is happy.” That streak of our early European settlers unfortunately survives in us and keeps surfacing through moral panics. Four hundred years ago it was witches, then it was Catholic immigrants, then “the devil’s music,” comic books, booze, communists, and now, information.

Because “freedom of speech” is now frequently described as a stalking horse for hate and discrimination — the UN High Commissioner Volker Türk scolded Elon Musk that “free speech is not a free pass” — it’s becoming one of those soon-to-be-extinct terms. Speech is mentioned in “reputable” media only as a possible vector for the informational disease known as misinformation. Soon all that will remain of the issue for most people is a flutter of the nerves, reminding them to avoid thinking about it.

The end game is not controlling speech. They’re already doing that. The endgame is getting us to forget we ever had anything to say . . .

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi’s Challenge to You

The Silence of the White House While Speech is Being Muzzled World Wide

The silence of the White House is Deafening, too horrible for most Americans to contemplate even though it deeply affects every American.

David Sachs:

"American politicians speak constantly about the indispensable role of the United States in leading the free world against authoritarianism. If that is true, why is the White House so silent in the face of new global threats to free speech? In January, American citizen Gonzalo Lira died in a Ukrainian prison for posting YouTube videos; the State Department didn’t lift a finger to help. Last week, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France for the crime of insufficient content moderation. Now Brazil has banned X for resisting the diktats of a tyrannical judge, who salivates over the possibility of jailing @elonmusk.

The EU is one step behind, with Eurocrat Thierry Breton pursuing a criminal investigation against Elon for “platforming disinformation,” which Breton defines to include a conversation with Donald Trump.

In the UK, the government of Keir Starmer imprisons critics of open borders with more zeal than it prosecutes violent crime. In Canada, Justin Trudeau crushed a trucker protest against vaccine mandates by asserting sweeping new powers to freeze bank accounts.

At no point has the White House expressed concern about this new iron curtain that seems to be descending across the West. Quite the contrary, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the Biden-Harris administration repeatedly pressured Meta to censor during Covid. Worse, the FBI primed Facebook to censor true stories about Biden Family corruption by suggesting that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation (even though the FBI knew it was authentic).

Barring court intervention, TikTok will shut down in the U.S. on January 19, 2025 thanks to a new power authorized by Congress to ban websites and applications that the President determines are subject to the influence of a foreign adversary. X may not be far behind if liberal elites and deep state apparatchiks like Robert Reich and Alexander Vindman get their wish. They have called for the U.S. to adopt Brazil’s and the EU’s approach and “rein in” Elon Musk.

Hypocritically, the same voices demanding this crackdown are also the loudest in proclaiming the West to be engaged in a “war on authoritarianism” against countries like Russia and China. But whatever their other sins, Russia and China are in no position to deprive American citizens of their free speech rights; only our own government can do that.

Similarly, if Western leaders truly wanted to prevent authoritarianism, the easiest place to start would be at home, protecting the civil liberties of their own citizens. Instead they seem obsessed with deflecting the public’s attention onto foreign enemies, as Orwell depicted in the Two Minutes Hate in 1984.

As this battle over free speech heats up in an election year, where do the candidates stand? Donald Trump has declared his support for free speech whereas Kamala Harris has said nothing and can be expected to continue her administration’s policy of tacit approval of creeping censorship. In just two months, Americans will decide. Do we actually lead the free world in standing up for free speech, or do we accept the authoritarianism we claim to detest so much?"

Continue ReadingThe Silence of the White House While Speech is Being Muzzled World Wide

FIRE’s Position on TikTok Litigation

Excerpt from FIRE's recent Amicus Brief:

Never before has Congress taken the extraordinary step of effectively banning a communications platform, let alone one used by half the country. But this spring, Congress did exactly that when it passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The law not only threatens TikTok’s U.S. operation but also exposes other online platforms to burdensome restrictions, including potential bans, if they have even tenuous connections to certain foreign countries.

TikTok and its users quickly filed lawsuits in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which the act gives exclusive jurisdiction for challenges to the law. FIRE, joined by the Institute for Justice and the Reason Foundation, filed an amici curiae — “friend of the court” — brief supporting the plaintiffs. We argued the law violates the First Amendment in two ways.

First, it explicitly targets a specific communications platform — and the users who speak and access content on it — for the purpose of silencing opinions and ideas that lawmakers oppose. Such attempts to suppress disfavored views strike at the heart of the First Amendment.

Second, to the extent the law is motivated by national security concerns, Congress has failed to build a public record explaining why such a dramatic restriction of Americans’ right to speak and access information is necessary to address those concerns. (However, the court will not consider the brief for procedural reasons explained in the note following this article.)

Recent development:

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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?

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

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