U.S. Funded Censors Hide in the Shadows

If our government were proud of how it is spewing propaganda and muzzling Americans, why is it going to great lengths to hide what it is doing from concerned citizens and their representatives. Matt Taibbi did a deep dive in his most recent article, titled FOIA Files: "Arizona State UniversityOur latest FOIA disclosures reveal that the Department of State was issuing grants to "anti-disinformation" researchers at ASU."

Our latest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) results show that the university has done significant work on “disinformation” for the State Department. But of what sort? Back in January, Gabe Kaminsky of The Washington Examiner reported that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) had given three direct awards to ASU. But the redacted documents uncovered by Kaminsky don’t explain the purpose of the awards.

Last month, the House Committee on Small Business released a report that details the lengths to which the GEC has gone to evade congressional oversight. The committee sent the GEC a subpoena in June, only to be told that it would take the State Department another twenty-one months to produce the requested documents.

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Inverted Totalitarianism

You are here, blinded, patronized, constrained, and contorted in the land of inverted totalitarianism. And it is almost invisible, because they give us bread and circuses to keep us fat and happy.  Robert Malone explains:

Inverted totalitarianism in the United States evolved from the subtle but seismic shift in which corporate and economic powers learned to exert significant control over governance and societal functions through the corruption of both the political arms of government and the administrative state while maintaining the facade of democratic processes.

Inverted totalitarianism operates through the integration of economic with political power to control the levers of government. This system doesn't require a dictator or a single-party state. It thrives on the undue influence of corporations, financial institutions, the censorship-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex while maintaining the facade of a democratic process. Corporations and wealthy elites influence policy through lobbying, campaign finance, and the revolving doors between business and government. This all works to ensure policies that favor corporate economic interests over public interest. The apathetic public is placated into compliance through consumerism, media control, censorship, propaganda, and a political system that offers limited choice within a very controlled spectrum of political thought (“Overton window”). Although elections continue, they are constrained to the range of acceptable candidates and solutions, which are limited to those that corporate-controlled MSM supports and pre-selects through processes that are only partially transparent. The Overton window, which describes the range of allowed public discourse, is actively controlled. The result is that the final candidates in significant elections do not threaten corporatist control of government, and legislative actions are massaged to produce bills favorable to the economic interests that control the State.

This leads to people feeling perpetually powerless, resulting in widespread political disengagement or a sense of political despair. The system allows a culture of limited individualism (within allowed boundaries) and promotes consumerism over collective political action through democratic processes.

Continuous threats linked to infectious disease, terrorism, or economic crises are promoted by the government (psychological bioterrorism and disaster cronyism), and corporate entities acting in tandem with the State actively promote security measures and policies that erode civil liberties, all while maintaining a veneer of democracy.

Digital surveillance, surveillance capitalism, social media, and a globalized economy based on the fusion of corporatism with socialism (ergo, 21st-century Fascism) cooperate to entrench the United States into a managed democracy. Democratic processes have become mere formalities in the face of overwhelming globalist power.

Chris Hedges explained "Inverted Totalitarianism" this way in 2021:
The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.

Hedges continued:

Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative, it is the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power.

See also, "De-Tot," Decentralized Totalitarianism, discussed here by Jonathan Haidt.

The difference between totalitarian and a dictator is that a dictator tells you what he wants, and he’ll kill you if you don’t do it. But totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life. “We’re going to control how you raise your kids what to think of the food you eat, the science, everything, control everything.” That’s very hard to do. It’s only been tried a few times, certainly the Russians, the Chinese. Only a few countries have been tried to control everything of your life. And in a way this thing that we call wokeness has elements that are totalitarian, but there’s no person. There’s no authority. So what you have when everybody can record everybody, when everybody can shame everybody, you get human behavior reacting as if you were in a totalitarian country, but yet there’s no totalitarian.

The end result, the great danger of totalitarianism, is dehumanization. Christopher Hitchens:

“I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy; the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.” These totalitarianism tactics work powerfully and insidiously through the process of Mass Formation Hypnosis, detailed by Mathias Desmet (and explained by Robert Malone.''

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Chris Hedges Comments on the U.S. Security State and the DNC

Chris Hedges was recently on Glenn Greenwald's System Update offering a wide-ranging analysis of current events. I copied the following excerpts concerning the U.S. Security State and the disturbing transformation of the DNC:

G. Greenwald: Anyone covering foreign policy and covering wars as you did for so long, obviously has to deal with, in all sorts of ways, the U.S. security state, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and sort of how it influences a lot of these policies. There's no way to understand one without the other. After 9/11, we saw this series of whistleblowers from within the U.S. Security State, and people like William Binney, Thomas Drake, and, of course, culminating with Edward Snowden, all have the same grievance, namely, that the whole foundation of this secret part of our government that would act without democratic accountability and outside of any transparency would be the one taboo would ever be turning their power inward to manipulate the American population and domestic population. And a lot of that came forward primarily based on their grievance, that that was the thing that they thought would never happen. And they were seeing that more and more and more and more, that almost as much as these agencies were focused on foreign governments, they were focused on our domestic politics as well. I know there's been a lot of that since the creation of the U.S. Security State, but do you agree that that has gotten worse and more dire, more evident – the idea that the U.S. Security State now plays a bigger role than ever before in our domestic politics?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it's completely unaccountable and you can't control it. That's the problem. And Arnold Toynbee when he writes about the decline of the Empire, talks about these rogue intelligence, military complexes, institutions that essentially can no longer be regulated, can no longer be constrained. All of the people who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, you know, there should be accountability there. Not only is there no accountability, but the same people are leading us into the disasters in Ukraine and funneling weapons to sustain the genocide in Gaza. And that's very dangerous because, at the beginning of an empire, empires are very judicious, usually about the use of force. What characterizes declining dying empires is military adventurism, where they seek to gain a diminishing or a loss to Germany through a military fiasco. And I think we can start with Vietnam and go basically right through just one military debacle after another. What we've done in the Middle East is probably the greatest strategic blunder, you know, in American history.

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George Carlin Bit on Assassination, Etc.

I don't think of Donald Trump as a big advocate for peace and harmony, but he has spoken out against U.S. warmongering far more than Kamala Harris, who now has the endorsements of Dick Cheney and his minions.  If you are a candidate who speaks out against U.S. warmongering, you are threatening the  jobs of the U.S. military and U.S. security state employees. It also appears that you are risking your own life.

Assassination. You know what's interesting about assassination? Well, not only does it change those popularity polls in a big fucking hurry, but it's also interesting to notice who it is we assassinate. You ever notice who it is? Stop to think of who it is we kill. It's always people who've told us to live together in harmony and try to love one another. Jesus Gandhi, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin, Luther King, Medgar Evers Malcolm X John Lennon, they all said, try to live together peacefully. Bam, right in the fucking head. Apparently, we're not ready for that. Yeah, that's difficult behavior for us.

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