During the George W. Bush years, Glenn Greenwald rose to prominence for his opposition to the White House’s record on civil liberties.
Oh, the left wing establishment loved him. But Greenwald is a not a one-side-of-the-aisle critic. When it comes to outing government repression to the disinfecting rays of sunshine, Glenn is an equal opportunity critic.
Recently Greenwald published a thread on Twitter. Here he describes exactly what’s going on with the suppression of dissident voices. This is not “they’re private companies; they can do what they want.” Greenwald lets a flood of sunlight onto the dark crevasses of Big Tech/government collusion.
The regime of censorship being imposed on the internet – by a consortium of DC Dems, billionaire-funded “disinformation experts,” the US 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, 1/6, COVID and war in Ukraine all fostered new methods of repression.
I agree with Greenwald about the intensification that is going on. Glenn does not go back to the event that really started this ball rolling.
9/11 was a triggering event that led to the passage of the Patriot Act. The problem it was supposed to solve was the so-called impenetrable wall between the DOJ/FBI and the CIA, etc. Supposedly this led to the intelligence failures that permitted 9/11 to happen. That is a different debate that will not be discussed here.
What is true is that the Patriot Act weaponized the DOJ and FBI against Americans. That is when all of our electronic ‘metadata’ came under federal surveillance.
There were supposed to be safeguards to prevent violations of the Bill of Rights. In practice, the FISA Court, a secret court, is little more than a rubber stamp for whatever the government wants to do.
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 DC to explicitly coerce Big Tech silencing of their opponents and dissent. This is *Govt 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 US/UK 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. Masquerading as “journalists,” they align with the scummiest Dem groups 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.
The lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana have recently gained access to emails between the Federal Government and certain social media giants.
Top-ranking Biden administration officials appear to have pressured Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to censor content the federal government considered misinformation.
The emails, procured in a federal lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, detail months of apparent coordination between federal administration officials and social media giants on how to address information regarding COVID-19.
It is clear that the idea of a public debate by experts about the merits of differing approaches to the COVID virus, was an anathema to those who want to control what people think and do.
This is happening because DC Dems and the US 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.
Let’s think about this for a moment. The EU is now so afraid of how the people will react to uncensored news about Ukraine that they will only permit propaganda to be disseminated. Just how bad was the ethnic cleansing that the Ukrainian Azov regiment was engaged in against Russian speakers in Ukraine?
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.
Sam Harris agrees with Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. While Donald Trump is aggrieved by this fact, Sam rejoices. Harris gave an interview in which he detailed just how noble and good this was. This follows the idea that if someone on the left engages in illegal activity, it is okay if the mission is the advancement of an ideology aligned with leftist ideals. The end justifies the means.
Let’s recall, as a result of the 2016 Primary elections, the Democrat National Committee was sued by Bernie Sanders supporters who thought their candidate was deprived of a fair shot at the nomination. In defense of this lawsuit, the DNC stated that nowhere in their documentation of the primary election process do they promise a fair election. I cite this as concrete proof that Democrats do not believe in free and fair elections. 2020 was not an outlier.
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 [censored] 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 apologized? This is why: they believe they are so benevolent, their cause so just, that lying and censorship are benevolent.
The latest ploy in this narrative of information suppression is to promote the idea that “people will die” if information contained in the documents that PDJT declassified before he left office is released to the public. This is like those PSAs about the jab that try to coerce people with statements like “you don’t want to be responsible for someone dying if you don’t get vaccinated, do you?”
Let’s recall that this is not the CIA’s first foray into concocting false narratives about very well-known events. On July 17, 1996, TWA 800 was shot down by what was most likely a surface-to-air missile off the south shore of Long Island. When the FBI was apparently ready to issue this as the preliminary cause, the CIA went to work and produced a cartoonish model of the incident that defied the laws of physics. This eventually became the “official” cause of the incident years later.
Why was this done? Bill Clinton was running for re-election. The truth might have derailed that. That incident was most likely “friendly fire.”
This is Orwellian at its very core. Evil is good. Good is evil.
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 AOC, 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 Hayes’s and Don Lemon’s 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)….
Think about the differences in how BLM and Antifa were treated in 2020. They were good servants of leftist ideology. They burned, looted, assaulted and killed. All of this was done almost entirely with impunity. The J6 protesters who paraded through the Capitol Building (a misdemeanor at most) languished in jail for a long time until they were pressured into guilty pleas just to regain their freedom.
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/WPost, etc.).
It’s equally true of those now claiming to fight “fascism”: real repression comes *from them.*
Greenwald has hit the nail on the head with this thread. Fascism has descended on America. Joe Biden demonstrated this with his speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
Will the Internet be the source of our redemption? At one time the entire internet was open and free. That is true no longer. However, there are areas still largely immune to suppression of information. Podcasting is one such area. Other smaller social media platforms (Gab, Gettr, Substack, etc.) are rapidly growing due to the fact that they allow freedom of expression.
Will the stranglehold that government and Big Tech have on the dissemination of information be broken? Maybe. Until that happens, support those sources that are working to give you the truth, come what may.