U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald has condemned the Government, media and Big Tech for coordinating to censor dissent. Writing on Twitter on Tuesday, the Intercept cofounder blasted those who have taken advantage of a series of ‘crises’ as a pretext to conspire to suppress their ideological opponents. The searing Twitter thread is reproduced in full below.
The regime of censorship being imposed on the internet – by a consortium of Washington D.C. Democrats, billionaire-funded ‘disinformation experts’, the U.S. Security State, and liberal employees of media corporations – is dangerously intensifying in ways I believe are not adequately understood.
A series of “crises” have been cynically and aggressively exploited to inexorably restrict the range of permitted views and expand pretexts for online silencing and deplatforming. Trump’s election, Russiagate, January 6th, Covid and war in Ukraine all fostered new methods of repression.
During the failed attempt in January to force Spotify to remove Joe Rogan, the country’s most popular podcaster – remember that? – I wrote that the current religion of Western liberals in politics and media is censorship: their prime weapon of activism.
But that Rogan failure only strengthened their repressive campaigns. Dems routinely abuse their majoritarian power in D.C. to explicitly coerce Big Tech silencing of their opponents and dissent. This is Government censorship disguised as corporate autonomy.
There’s now an entire new industry, aligned with Dems, to pressure Big Tech to censor. Think tanks and self-proclaimed ‘disinformation experts’ funded by Omidyar, Soros and the U.S./U.K. Security State use benign-sounding names to glorify ideological censorship as neutral expertise.
The worst, most vile arm of this regime are the censorship-mad liberal employees of big media corporations (@oneunderscore__, @BrandyZadrozny, @TaylorLorenz, NYT tech unit). Masquerading as ‘journalists’, they align with the scummiest Dem groups (@mmfa) to silence and deplatform.
It is astonishing to watch Dems and their allies in media corporations posture as opponents of ‘fascism’ – while their main goal is to unite state and corporate power to censor their critics and degrade the internet into an increasingly repressive weapon of information control.
A major myth that must be quickly dismantled: political censorship is not the byproduct of autonomous choices of Big Tech companies. This is happening because D.C. Dems and the U.S. Security State are threatening reprisals if they refuse. They’re explicit.
But the worst is watching people whose job title in corporate HR Departments is ‘journalist’ take the lead in agitating for censorship. They exploit the platforms of corporate giants to pioneer increasingly dangerous means of banning dissenters. These are the authoritarians.
This is the frog-in-boiling-water problem: the increase in censorship is gradual but continuous, preventing recognition of how severe it’s become. The EU now legally mandates censorship of Russian news. They’ve made it illegal for companies to air it.
So many new tactics of censorship repression have emerged in the West: Trudeau freezing bank accounts of trucker-protesters; Paypal partnering with ADL to ban dissidents from the financial system; Big Tech platforms openly colluding in unison to de-person people from the internet.
All of this stems from the classic mentality of all would-be tyrants: our enemies are so dangerous, their views so threatening, that everything we do – lying, repression, censorship – is noble. That’s what made the Sam Harris confession so vital: that’s how liberal elites think.
This is why I regard the Hunter Biden scandal as uniquely alarming. The media didn’t just ‘bury’ the archive. CIA concocted a lie about it (it’s ‘Russian disinformation’); media outlets spread that lie; Big Tech censured it – because lying and repression to them is justified.
The authoritarian mentality that led CIA, corporate media and Big Tech to lie about the Biden archive before the election is the same driving this new censorship craze. It’s the hallmark of all tyranny: “Our enemies are so evil and dangerous, anything is justified to stop them.”
How come not one media outlet that spread this CIA lie – the Hunter Biden archive was ‘Russian disinformation‘ – retracted or apologised? This is why: they believe they are so benevolent, their cause so just, that lying and censorship are benevolent.
The one encouraging aspect: as so often happens with despotic factions, they are triggering and fueling the backlash to their excesses. Sites devoted to free speech – led by Rumble, along with Substack, Callin, and others – are exploding in growth.
But as these free speech platforms grow and become a threat, the efforts to crush them also grow – exactly as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, other Dems and their corporate media allies successfully demanded Google, Apple and Amazon destroy Parler when it became the single most popular app in the country.
It is hard to overstate how much pressure is now brought to bear by liberal censors on these free speech platforms, especially Rumble. Their vendors are threatened. Their hosting companies targeted. They have accounts cancelled and firms refusing to deal with them. It’s a regime.
It’s not melodrama or hyperbole to say: what we have is a war in the West, a war over whether the internet will be free, over whether dissent will be allowed, over whether we will live in the closed propaganda system our elites claim the Bad Countries™ impose. It’s no different.
In even the most despotic nations, the banal, conformist citizen thinks they’re free. As Rosa Luxemburg said: “He who does not move, does not feel his chains.” Of course the Chris Hayeses and Don Lemons think this is all absurd: Good Liberals threaten nobody and thus flourish.
The measure of societal freedom is not how servants of power are treated: they’re always left alone or rewarded. The key metric is how dissidents are treated. Now, they are imprisoned (Assange), exiled (Snowden) and, above all, silenced by corporate/state power (dissidents).
For more than a month, I’ve removed myself from the news cycle and the Discourse because my only priority right now is my family, my kids and my husband’s health. But distance brings clarity. This censorship mania consuming Western liberals is deeply dangerous – and growing.
As I’ve often said, the media outlets screaming most loudly about ‘disinformation’ are the ones that spread it most frequently, casually and destructively (NBC/CNN/Washington Post, etc.). It’s equally true of those now claiming to fight ‘fascism’: real repression comes from them.
I’m going to remain detached until the health crisis in our family is resolved. But internet freedom and free speech are not ancillary causes. They are central. This was the core cause of the Snowden reporting. Without a free internet and free speech, dissent is an illusion.
Above all, stay focused on who your real enemies are. They’re not your neighbours who have been deceived into supporting the wrong party or wrong ideology. They are victims of the repression, which is all about maintaining a closed system of propaganda that can’t be challenged.
The worst of all – the most repugnant and despicable – are those calling themselves ‘journalists’ while doing the opposite of what that term implies: they serve rather than challenge power, they deceive rather than inform, they demand censorship rather than free and open inquiry.
Heap scorn on the corporate outlets and their deceitful, pro-censorship employees abusing the ‘journalist’ label. Read them with full scepticism, or just ignore them. Support outlets and platforms that want to protect free inquiry and the right of dissent, not rob you of it.
At the Daily Sceptic we would of course add climate alarmism and wokery to the list of current pretexts for censorship.
Stop Press: A court has ordered Anthony Fauci, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and other top Biden administration officials who were resisting efforts to obtain their communications with Big Tech companies to hand over the records. It comes as part of the action by the Attorneys General of Louisiana and Missouri against the U.S. Government over alleged collusion with Big Tech firms such as Facebook. Initial revelations from this case have shown that more than 50 Government officials across a dozen agencies were involved in applying pressure to social media companies to censor users. The documents now ordered to be released are likely to be equally if not more damning, and will include what top Government officials including Dr. Fauci wrote in private to bring about censorship of dissenting opinions on the lab-leak theory of Covid origins and the efficacy of masks and lockdowns.
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‘Stop Press” would seem to signal that “the solids are about to hit the airconditioning” as Private Eye would say. Let’s hope so!
Note that while Fox News has made the story about Fauci and KJP a front page highlight on its website, it’s completely absent from MSNBC, WaPo, NYT and all the usual suspects. I almost feel sorry for the real journalists who must still work in some corners of the MSM, since every story, more than ever before, has to be checked for compliance with an accepted way of thinking before it can even be discussed, let alone editorially slanted.
We need something like Fox here in terms of its reach.
The problem with Fox is that the left believe it is the outpourings of the devil, and wont believe one word of what is said. The UK leftie are the same with GB News although GB News has managed to keep pretty much in the centre/right, and almost always has voices from both sides.
Isn’t that more a problem with the left than a problem with Fox?
That said, Fox is probably too cartoonish to be the right model for better media in the UK and Canada. I often think Tucker and the other Fox News celebrities are just sort of cosplay populists who just want to get paid rather than deliver honest news.
Let’s hope so, but the swamp is deep and dragging the creatures out is much more difficult than one judge can accomplish.
Private Eye of an earlier era would have condemned social media but today it just sucks up to them as it does the political class.
such is the fall of a great magazine, a bit like Speccie of late.
At the same time, the MSM is dying. Let’s not forget that. While these people can appear overbearingly strong, they are in fact very weak.
The Canadian solution is very simple. Trudeau literally pays them the amount that allows them to survive, in exchange for their compliance. It’s just as nakedly obvious as it sounds. For an example of how what Greenwald says is entirely right, take a look at the way Bill C-18 is presented: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2022/04/government-introduces-a-bill-to-ensure-fair-compensation-for-news-media-and-the-sustainability-of-local-news.html
“In an era of rising disinformation and increasing public mistrust, this new legislation will ensure Canadians have access to quality, fact-based news at the local and national levels.”
Note that this “fact-based” news will come from the CBC (which gets $1 billion / year) and the other Canadian MSM outlets that Trudeau paid to the tune of $600 million in 2019. I know many people here who literally only read / watch CBC News and the Globe and Mail, which means they are just getting a firehose of Liberal propaganda, often couched in typically polite and moralizing Canadian language, but nonetheless completely silent on anything that isn’t part of the acceptable narrative. Many Canadians really haven’t encountered messaging as benign as the indisputable fact that covid vaccines don’t prevent infection, let alone any wider form of skepticism. They live in a bubble of propaganda, and the worst thing in the world to them is the idea that a moment of thought could overlap in the most minuscule way with the views of anyone outside of this bubble.
But how long before all but the most purblind of the people you describe see though this?
Cold and hunger are great awakeners.
This might sound hyperbolic, but I think the calculation that Trudeau and his handlers are making is that it will simply be too late. These people resolutely do not believe in democracy at the level of the nation state. For them, democracy occurs in globalist forums with other like-minded autocrats and their goal is to have the world governed in this way. The pretexts of covid, climate change, anti-racism, etc. are the things they use to convince themselves that “some issues are just too important to be decided by ordinary people with their retrograde views.”
As the saying goes, ‘None are so fallible as those who are sure they are right’.
I remain confident that time will find them out, although Heaven Knows what collateral damage they’ll cause along the way.
The swamp not only needs to be drained, it needs to be nuked from the air.
Seems to me a future real Republican President and Congress should change the law to the disadvantage of social media firms and tax them painfully. Payback!
Two things……they know that we know, and like everything else, they don’t give a crap..I mean seriously think about it, there is now masses of evidence to show that the quacksine is killing people in massive numbers…and we still have the mainstream media telling us to get another…this is just beyond next level gaslighting isn’t it?
Second….It’s not just obvious stuff..it’s everywhere. I can’t be the only person who has noticed a Google search doesn’t bring up a tenth of the stuff it used to…it’s also always whatever the narrative happens to be pedalling…..
Just an example, I tried to find how often Pakistan had flooded previously…no chance….pages and pages of the recent flooding and climate change guff…
We are at war, unequivocally…..
When one is awakened to how the world actually is everything seems so clear and bleeding obvious that it is hard to think that everyone can’t see it.
But there are many still sleepwalking through life believing all the rubbish being peddled by the establishment and their media. To them we seem like looneys.
Retail Fatwa: WH Smith Bans “European Conservative” Magazine From Shops Due to Leftist Pressure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6aQIfDlvqk
The European Conservative, a right-leaning journal that explores conservatism in Europe, has been pulled from WH Smith’s shelves following complaints from a handful of woke progressives who objected to some of its content, particularly an interview with Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and a cartoon satirising the teaching of LGBTQ+ ideology in schools.
Alvino-Mario Fantini, The European Conservative’s Editor in-Chief, describes the censorship as “retail fatwa”.
Writer Harrison Pitt, a regular contributor to the popular journal, joins Peter Whittle to discuss the story.
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That’s all nice and dandy but amounts to little more but the usual US navel-gazing. Maybe we’ll eventually be saved by someone. But certainly not by people who stubbornly refuse to learn that mulitnational corporation are an anathema to a corporate state because if they did, they would have to stop to use fascist as extremely convenient slur for people who opinions I really disagree with. This shared habit marks both of these supposedly opposing groups as just two sides of the same coin.