radiofree.asia

Category: Censorship

  • NCAC releases new resource for authors of banned or challenged books

    NEW YORK – The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) today released a new resource that provides practical advice for authors whose books are being challenged and banned in K – 12 schools and libraries. Prepared in collaboration with writers who have faced censorship, it is available on the NCAC website. Book challenges can be exasperating, […]

    The post NCAC releases new resource for authors of banned or challenged books appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog Archives – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine

    The 26 January JTA Daily Briefing arrived in my mailbox with the subject: “Major Israeli Raid in Jenin Kills 9 Palestinians.” I was sadly dumbfounded by the imparted insensitivity and inhumanity. Would any humanity-loving organization blare such news about the killing of the Other? Supposedly, the Oslo accords were a movement toward peace, but Zionist Israel has continued to wreak violence unabated, and Palestinians of every age and gender are the victims whether they be civilians or not. Yes, the violence is not only from one side, but the violence is overwhelmingly carried out by the Israeli side. And, when it comes to violence by Palestinians, one must realize that they have the right to resist oppression, occupation, siege, and violence.

    Imagine what would have been the reaction in the West if a headline had appeared — “Major Palestinian Raid in Tel Aviv Kills 9 Palestinians”?

    Such is the hypocrisy of the “West” that Israel can unleash lethal violence against Palestinians with scarcely a peep from the “West.” A Palestinian reprisal would undoubtedly be denounced in the strongest language as terrorism, and Palestinian officials would be called onto the carpet to unequivocally condemn the violence. Even the United Nations hardly comes across as a neutral party.

    The US can steal oil in open daylight from Syria, and there is not a peep from US-allied countries. Palestinians know this all too well, as Israel has been expropriating Palestinian oil and gas for years. The US occupies Cuban territory, and there is hardly a peep from the US-alliance. Britain can steal the gold reserves of the Venezuelan people, and there is little complaint from governments in the West.

    Western thievery has extended to Russia, as its bank assets were frozen by the US and by the European Union with the stated intention of using Russian assets to reconstruct Ukraine.

    The peoples of Palestine, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela people, among other nationalities, suffer from US thievery and violence. As an accomplice or silent actor, this also points to the inhumanity of US-allied governments. These are the same governments that criticize Russia for its “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.

    A Telling Comparison

    What happened when one out-of-uniform US marine officer, first lieutenant Robert Paz, was killed by Panamanian soldiers in December 1989? US president George HW Bush launched Operation Just Cause [sic]. A US invasion of Panama happened. About 600 Panamanians were killed (half civilians) and 23 US soldiers. Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the drug-running CIA asset (and a person who should have been untouchable by having diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Article 29 reads, “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable.”) was abducted and brought back to the US to face American justice.

    Since 2014, following the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, a war has been carried out by the Ukrainian state, including its neo-Nazi fighters, against the predominantly ethnic Russian peoples of Donbass. Over 13,000 people had been killed, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.1

    Consider that the US invaded Panama after one US marine was killed, but the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians (who had been clamoring for secession to Russia) was muted by the US, the self-same country which created the circumstances that filliped Russia’s Special Military Operation to protect its security from further NATO encroachment.

    That the US invaded a country (many countries in its history) does not mitigate a Russian invasion of a country. But the invasions are not the same. There was no credible threat to US security from Syria, Palestine, Iran, Libya, Viet Nam, Venezuela, etc, but the US invaded or abetted the attack on these countries nonetheless. Russia has made irrefutably clear the security concerns posed by NATO missiles appearing on the Ukraine-Russia border just minutes away from Moscow. Russia was faced with an existential threat, a threat that the US would never allow (witness the US reaction to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba).

    This essential background information will not appear in monopoly media.

    1. “According to calculations of the total number of human losses related to the conflict in Ukraine (from April 14, 2014 to January 31, 2021) amounts to 42,000-44,000: 13,100-13,300 killed (no less than 3,375 civilians, about 4,150 Ukrainian servicemen and approximately 5,700 members of armed groups)… Tass.
    The post Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Florida Teachers Cover Books in Classrooms Over Fear of Anti-“WOKE” Laws

    Several teachers in a school district in Florida are putting covers over books in their classroom libraries due to a vague but far-reaching law that restricts what kind of content they can share with students. Several social media posts from teachers in the Manatee County School District show coverings over classroom libraries, accompanied by commentaries from the educators themselves expressing…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ND Anti-LGBTQ Bill Would Imprison Librarians for Not Removing Books

    Republican lawmakers in North Dakota have introduced a bill that would jail librarians for keeping books on their shelves that include images depicting gender identity or sexual orientation. House Bill 1205, introduced by Republican state Reps. Mike Lefor and Vicky Steiner, would prohibit books at public libraries that include images of sexual activity, including sexual intercourse.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media

    How many times have the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries been lied-to about invasions their Governments had made on the basis of falsehoods that their ‘news’-media knew at the time were false but nonetheless reported to them as being true? How many times have those ‘news’-media reported as being ‘a democratic revolution’ the overthrow of a foreign Government when those ‘news’-media knew, either while it was going on or else less than a month afterward, that it had actually been just another U.S. coup — and yet those same ‘news’-media still, even to this day, refuse to refer to that coup as HAVING BEEN a “coup”?

    Russia’s news-media are far more honest, and this will be documented here, by recent examples:

    On Friday, January 13, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, told the members of the U.N. Security Council, which includes all of the “Big 5” Permanent Members, including (besides Russia), U.S., China, France, and UK, that a negotiated end of the war in Ukraine “will only present itself once Ukraine stops posing a threat to Russia and discriminating against Russian-speaking Ukrainians,” and that, “If this result can be achieved through negotiations, we stand ready for this scenario. If not, then our tasks will be achieved by military means,” meaning that Ukraine’s current government will be replaced by one that will be imposed upon that country by means of that government’s surrender to Russia’s Government.

    This was an extremely important statement. It indicates that Russia will not negotiate an end to its invasion of Ukraine unless and until Ukraine’s government will first have accepted Russia’s fundamental terms — which Russia had actually stated on 24 February 2022 when starting its invasion — and that there no longer remain any other demands by Ukraine’s government upon Russia’s Government that Russia’s Government will consider or discuss with anyone. First must come Ukraine’s acceptance of those demands by Russia.

    This reflects a historic turning-point in the war. It means that either Ukraine and its allies — especially the U.S. — will defeat Russia in this war, or else Russia will defeat the U.S. and its allies in this war. It lays down the gauntlet, to the United States Government, and to its allies on the Security Council — France and UK — that either Russia or else the U.S. and its allies (including all of NATO) will win this war; or else the U.S. and its allies (including Ukraine’s government) will peaceably accept Russia’s basic demand, that “Ukraine stops posing a threat to Russia and discriminating against Russian-speaking Ukrainians.” In order for Ukraine to “stop posing a threat to Russia,” Ukraine and its allies would need to guarantee that Ukraine will NEVER become a member of the U.S. Government’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance, nor ever become in any other way a military ally of the U.S. Government. Russia will accept Ukraine’s returning to its prior neutrality, which it had during the period 1991 up to 20 February 2014, or else to become an ally of Russia, but Russia will no longer accept (as it had during 20 February 2014 to 24 February 2022) Ukraine’s being allied with Russia’s enemies. Russia won’t ever accept that, he is saying.

    Nebenzia’s historic announcement on Friday still has not yet been reported by any U.S.-and-allied news-medium. As this article is being written, on the afternoon of Saturday, 14 January 2023, at 2PM Eastern Standard Time in NYC — late enough for any U.S.-and-allied news-medium to have reported this momentous news — none reported it. A Web-search at that time showed “5 results” and the only mainstream one was Russia’s RT News headlining “Russia speaks on endgame for Ukraine conflict.” The other 4 were only copying that report. The news-report by Russia’s Tass News Agency, “Russia’s special operation will be over when its goals are achieved – envoy to UN,” was — like all other news-reports, besides RT’s, that aren’t basically controlled by the U.S. Government, filtered out — NOT shown — by a Web-search by the CIA-created Google, which still has a monopoly in the English language because all other search-engines use Google’s as their own base, from which they might further-censor-out their finds. (And here is another way that truth is suppressed in the U.S.-and-allied world.)

    That’s an example of momentous, historic news, which is NOT reported by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Fox News, Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, The Nation, Deutsche Welle, and all other U.S.-Government-controlled ‘news’-media. They’re not controlled directly by the U.S. Government, but instead by means of the few super-wealthy individuals (billionaires and centi-millionaires) who (by means of their corporations, think tanks, universities, etc.) control that Government by vetting any prospective candidate by either of the nation’s two political Parties who seeks to win his Party’s nomination to become a federal official. These are the political mega-donors. Their media hide this news, instead of report it. That’s why it’s NOT reported.

    They also hide supporting details, such as the reality that after Obama’s coup in Ukraine grabbed Ukraine for America’s billionaire masters, his junta called the residents in the far-eastern Donbass region where the coup was rejected the most vociferously, ‘terrorists’, and launched against them an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’, which has been slaughtering uncounted thousands of them ever since. The German independent journalist Alina Lipp has been filming there and trying to get the reality — such as this on January 12 — reported back to her homeland, but (as-of January 11) “German prosecutors claim that Ms Lipp’s Telegram channel is intended to destabilise the country’s [Germany’s] democracy and undermine public faith in established media,” so, her ‘“endorsing serious crime’ [in that way] is an offence that can be punished with up to three years in jail.”

    Another recent mega-news event they all hide was the news-report from Tass on January 10, “Corporate trail apparent in all four assassinations of US presidents — security official: Nikolay Patrushev believes that an increasingly large number of Americans say that the Republicans and the Democrats are merely “two actors in one staging that has nothing to do with democracy.” Patrushev is one of the top officials in Russia’s Government; and, according to the the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, he is a very important man. Wikipedia’s article about Patrushev says: “Belonging to the siloviki faction of president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, [3] Patrushev is believed to be one of the closest advisors to Putin and a leading figure behind Russia’s national security affairs.[4] He is considered as very hawkish towards the West and the US and has promoted various conspiracy theories. Patrushev is seen by observers as one of the likeliest candidates for succeeding Putin.[5]” So, America’s Deep State (America’s billionaires and their employees and many thousands of other hired agents) takes seriously what he says. On January 14, I Googled a key assertion by Patrushev in that article, saying that the U.S. Government is “cover for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world.” It found “6 results” and those were this Tass article and 5 others, all of which were based upon this tass article — none of which were by any U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, all of which instead hide his statement, which was made in a Russian national TV interview of him. So: here is that complete Tass article:

    MOSCOW, January 10. /TASS/. A corporate trail can be traced in all assassinations of US presidents, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said in an interview for aif.ru.

    “All four assassinations of American leaders are tied to a corporate trail,” he said in an interview published Tuesday.

    He explained that the American state is only a “cover for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world.” According to the official, transnational corporations treat even US presidents as “mere figureheads that can be silenced, as it happened with [Donald] Trump.”

    He believes that an increasingly large number of Americans say that the Republicans and the Democrats are merely “two actors in one staging that has nothing to do with democracy.”

    “The US authorities, allied to big business, serve the interests of trans-national corporations, including the military-industrial complex. The assertive policy of the White House, the unbridled aggressiveness of NATO, the emergence of the AUKUS military bloc and others – are also a consequence of corporate influence,” he concluded.

    Colonies and corporations

    Patrushev also noted that, in the past, the West achieved prosperity and global dominance through colonial conquests. He drew a parallel with transnational corporations that behave in a similar fashion, preferring to increase their capital by pumping resources from other countries and “using their system of dumbing down the masses to impose the idea about some rules that they have themselves invented and that do not correspond to international law.”

    The official stated that transnational corporations seriously influence local political and social and economic processes.

    “On the one hand , they introduce new technologies through direct investments, they increase labor productivity. But the population is unable to use these results, because the companies permanently supplant the local producer, becoming monopolies. By moving the main volume of income abroad, they devoid countries of an opportunity to increase their national welfare,” he elaborated.

    Meanwhile, according to Patrushev, national legal regulation is not enough to solve this problem, and the existing international legal regulation of economic activities of transnational corporations has been shaped in their interests and with their direct involvement.

    “Its amendment in favor of national interests of countries is being sabotaged,” he noted.

    “Amid the fundamental changes in the world, the corporations have one goal – to preserve the system of global exploitation. It is headed by an elite of businessmen that do not tie themselves to any states. Beneath it are the so-called developed countries and the ‘golden billion.’ And further below is the rest of humanity, contemptuously referred to as the ‘third world’,” the Secretary concluded.

    The assertions that Patrushev made there are documented true in my latest book, America’s Empire of Evil , except that his allegation regarding those assassinations concerns matters that the book doesn’t discuss, because — though I believe those allegations to be probably true — I’ve not yet researched those assassinations sufficiently to be writing about them. All the rest of his statement there is documented in my book, and the history of how it came to be this way is likewise fully described and documented there, so that the reader can understand how this came about. But, anyway, even if what Patrushev said there weren’t true, his having said it is of historic importance, because it indicates the extent to which Russia now, finally, recognizes the implacability of America’s Government regarding Russia — an implacability that started on 25 July 1945.

    The post Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Two Parties Of Capitalist Imperialists: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    They don’t just call Democrats “communists” and “Marxists” in order to attack Democrats, they do it to disappear the entire giant expanse of political spectrum that exists to the left of the capitalist imperialist Democratic Party. They want you to think that’s as far left as it gets.

    Democrats refer to themselves as “the left” for the same reason. Both mainstream factions work to shrink the Overton window into a tug-o-war between Republican capitalist imperialists and Democrat capitalist imperialists. Between two opposing factions of neoliberal neocons.

    ❖

    The problem with the belief that we must start new social media companies because the US government keeps infiltrating the popular social media companies is that it does nothing to confront the huge problem that the US government keeps infiltrating popular social media companies. Until we turn and squarely address the problem that the world’s most powerful government keeps infiltrating the popular online platforms we use to communicate with each other in order to interfere in our communications, they’re just going to keep doing it. Their actions need to be stopped.

    Sure you can keep starting new social media companies in response to this problem, but they’ll either remain small platforms without any meaningful influence or they’ll be overpowered by the US government and made to facilitate US information interests. That’s the real issue. To accept that we can only have unrestricted political speech on small platforms is to accept that we can have free speech so long as no one hears us. That we can say whatever we want as long as we speak it into a hole in the ground.

    Starting new platforms isn’t the solution to this problem. The solution to this problem is loud, forceful, aggressive opposition to the US government interfering with the way people communicate with each other on the internet until they stop. This is actually very possible to do, because the US government needs to preserve its image as an upholder of liberal values. If that image starts to deteriorate as public awareness grows that they’re working to censor worldwide political speech, their behavior will need to change. So what we can do is work to grow public awareness and opposition to the US government’s increasingly intrusive operations in Silicon Valley.

    That’s a much better use of our energy than self-isolating our dissident speech in small online platforms that have no mainstream impact. US government agencies would love it if we’d all self-quarantine ourselves in the obscure margins of the internet where we can’t infect the mainstream herd with wrongthink. We’d be doing their work for them. It’s better to stay on the largest platforms and work to open some eyes.

    ❖

    “China’s going to invade Taiwan!”

    “What? How do you know?”

    “Well we’re pouring tons of weapons into Taiwan, and we know we’d definitely invade if the Chinese were doing that in Cuba.”

    “Ahh. So you’ve got some solid intelligence then.”

    ❖

    I’m often accused of “praising” or “supporting” Russia or China, which is funny because I never actually do. People are just so accustomed to being told the US and its allies are pure good and its enemies are pure evil that anything outside this looks wildly imbalanced to them.

    It’s possible to saturate a civilization so thoroughly with propaganda that the entirely normal baseline act of focusing one’s criticisms on the world’s most powerful and destructive power center looks freakish and suspicious in contrast to what you’re accustomed to consuming. In reality, criticizing the US-centralized empire with appropriate and proportional forcefulness and focus looks like treasonous support for enemy nations for the same reason sunlight would seem shocking and abrasive to someone who’s lived their whole life in a cave.

    ❖

    We do not live in a free society, we live in a highly controlled society where we are psychologically manipulated into mental homogeneity in service of the powerful. Criticizing foreign countries for not having freedom like ours helps make our own society even more tightly controlled.

    We’re told we’re freer than other countries so that we won’t see how unfree we are. You can’t look down your nose at countries like China or North Korea and still clearly see how controlled and homogenized your own country is. You can’t celebrate your freedom while still lucidly understanding your oppression.

    The illusion of freedom is precisely where the reality of our imprisonment hides. We’ve been conditioned to mistake being able to choose between two fake political factions for political freedom. To mistake being able to regurgitate what we’ve been propagandized into saying for free speech.

    People say “I’m free because where I live I can say, do and experience anything I want!” But that’s not true; you can’t. You can only say, do and experience what you’ve been conditioned to want to say, do and experience by the mass-scale psychological manipulation you’ve been marinating in since birth. You can do what you want, but they control what it is that you want.

    There’s no better illustration of how unfree we are than the way westerners all think the same thoughts about how unfree people are in countries the western empire just so happens to disapprove of. We bleat in unison, “I’m so glad I don’t live in a tyrannical homogenized country like China where people aren’t free to be individuals.”

    We won’t be free until our minds are free. Until all of us (not just the lucky few who happen to stumble outside the narrative matrix) are able to shape their own perspectives based on truth rather than on what benefits the powerful. Until we’re able to become true individuals.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person

    This is what happens to anyone who happens to report the types of things that America’s billionaires want to be hidden from the public.

    To understand how it happened to me (and has happened to lots of others), an introduction is needed, first, about the American Government:

    America’s First Amendment to its Constitution is this sentence: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

    The best summary-description of what that means (as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court) is by the American Library Association, and includes the following crucial statement:

    “The First Amendment only prevents government restrictions on speech. It does not prevent restrictions on speech imposed by private individuals or businesses. Facebook and other social media can regulate or restrict speech hosted on their platforms because they are private entities.”

    So long as a “private” entity censors public debate, the nation’s laws cannot get involved in that — that censorship cannot be outlawed. If public debate can be squelched by private entities, that’s okay, in America’s system of Government.

    The false assumption of this system is that allowing private entities to squelch “the press” or “the news media,” is okay because different private entities will squelch different truths from being presented to the public; and, so, each citizen will select which types of truths not to know, and which types of lies to believe instead — and that’s ‘democracy’ in America. Having different private entities black-out different truths and filter-in different lies instead, will give each citizen whatever he or she wants to believe. The individual will select on the basis of one’s own prejudices. That’s the individual’s ‘freedom’. The consumer will choose which type of fool to be (such as a fool of Democratic Party billionaires, or a fool of Republican Party billionaires), and will buy (believe) whatever lies he or she wants. But is that — belief in the political falsehoods that the individual prefers — really democracy? Won’t the result be instead to cement-in whatever myths that are setting different groups in the society against each other — instead of going against whatever is actually wrong with the Government? How will whatever is wrong with the Government get fixed, that way? Is it even possible?

    Scientific empirical studies that compare what the American public want to become laws in America and of what they don’t want to become laws, versus what actually does become law and what does not, have shown that only the preferences of the very wealthiest Americans affect and shape the nation’s laws. This is a one-dollar-one-vote country, not a one-person-one-vote country. (This is an empirical fact, not a theory.) America’s Government is an aristocracy, not a democracy. It’s controlled by counting the wealth, not really by counting the persons. Furthermore, 57.16% of the money that is donated to political campaigns in the U.S. comes from the richest one-ten-thousandth (top 0.01% wealthiest) of the American people (the “original donors” — the actual individuals who donated it); so, the individuals who own the controlling interests in the corporations, think tanks, foundations, and media that shape public opinion in America and who thus determine who becomes elected and who does not, are only the very richest few, America’s actual aristocrats, the people who control the public. The public thus vote the way that the super-rich of both Parties want them to vote. There is a technology of “manufactured ‘public’ consent,” and it’s controlled by the billionaires — NOT by the public. And whereas Democratic Party billionaires determine who get nominated by their Party, and Republican billionaires determine who get nominated by their Party, virtually no one gets elected who wasn’t first selected and backed by that Party’s billionaires.

    Since those few individuals control the media, they ALSO are the ULTIMATE employers of the various censors — both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side.

    All of the media that are NOT controlled by the super-rich are small (none of them are large, or even medium-sized), and one of those is “Ms. Cat’s Chronicles”. On January 3rd, they headlined linking through to one of the 5 (out of the 200+ that I submitted it to) sites that had published my December 30th article, “Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths, And Demands Spreading Lies”, and they gave an excerpt from the full article, and they noted “Related: Eric Zuesse’s Now-Deleted Profile at Modern Diplomacy” but here is what became of that profile. It’s gone. All of my hundreds of articles which had been published at Modern Diplomacy are gone. I am now a non-person there (which had been one of the few remaining sites that the billionaires hadn’t yet gotten under their control). And here is the full article that was linked-through to, by “Ms. Cat”: it was published at Oriental Review, “Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths, And Demands Spreading Lies”, and it explains, and fully documents, how the owner of Modern Diplomacy was forced, by ‘NewsGuard’ in Washington DC, to remove me — the author there that had drawn more page-views than any other author there. And yet, all of those articles now are gone. And you can see described there how it was done, and you can also see that truthfulness had nothing whatsoever to do with my being removed, but that my reporting the ‘wrong’ truths had everything to do with it. A censoring organization that had been funded by some billionaires’ agents, and called itself a “news guard” for the general public, did it. I report truths that all American billionaires (the people who actually control the U.S. Government) want Americans NOT to know. And now, the billionaires are going after EVEN the few (all of them very small) remaining sites, that publish SOME articles that the billionaires want the public NOT to see.

    There is no way to solve this, other than by outlawing ALL censorship, and allowing the public to see everything — regardless of whether or not some ‘news’-media owner, or billionaire-funded ‘NewsGuard’ service, doesn’t like it.

    Censorship that’s done by the agents of the billionaires who control a Government is just as vile as is censorship that’s done DIRECTLY BY that Government. ALL censorship should be outlawed, regardless of who does that censorship. Otherwise, how is an authentic democracy even possible?

    This problem can exist ONLY in a country that has enormous wealth-inequality (such as the U.S. does) and that allows by law (such as the U.S. does) agents of its very wealthiest few to coerce all but a few of the smallest news media to eliminate — not to publish — whatever those super-wealthy individuals want to be blacklisted (not published). The reality in the U.S. today is a ‘democracy’ of, by, and for, only its super-rich, none of whom want the public to know this fact. One way or another, a country that has enormous wealth-inequality will be a dictatorship; and no dictatorship can exist and be perpetuated without censorship. Censorship is the cardinal mark of any dictatorship. Only without censorship can democracy exist, at all. To censor is to mentally control another person — not to inform that person. It is mentally to enslave, not to free, that person. It is not to educate but to miseducate and manipulate that person. Any authentic democracy will do everything possible to prevent censorship.

    Julian Assange has been imprisoned by the UK on the demand by the U.S. for over a decade now, though never convicted of anything, but ONLY because he was the world’s most effective champion against censorship and for international democracy and personal accountability. To call either of these countries a democracy is to lie, and to insult the very term “democracy.” What Governments deserve to be overthrown and replaced more than those two do? However, any such revolution must be against censorship, and must itself be overthrown and replaced if it entails any censorship. To replace one dictatorship by another is no path toward freedom.

    The post The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Still US State-Affiliated Media

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A couple of months into Elon Musk’s control of Twitter, it’s fair to say that from an anti-censorship, pro-transparency perspective there have been a few positive results of the platform coming under new management. The revelations from the Twitter Files about US government involvement in influencing a massive social media company’s policies and actions have been indisputably newsworthy information that’s absolutely in the public interest to have, and some anti-establishment voices have been saying their accounts have been noticeably more visible since the changeover.

    It’s also fair to say at this point that Musk has allowed far more negative practices to continue than he has ended. In an excellent new article titled “Under Musk, Twitter Continues to Promote US Propaganda Networks,” Fair.org’s Bryce Greene breaks down the many different ways that Twitter is still manipulating the information its users see in ways that serve the interests of the US government.

    Greene contrasts the wildly unbalanced way media coming from empire-targeted governments is suppressed and labeled “state-affiliated media”, while US-aligned accounts which would deserve such a designation are not given it, and are often amplified and aided.

    “In short, Twitter is serving as an active participant in an ongoing information war,” Greene writes.

    I highly recommend reading the article in full, because it paints a very lucid picture of the Silicon Valley platform’s facilitation of US information interests and Musk’s role in it, but here are a few highlights:

    • “FAIR could find no examples of accounts labeled ‘United States state-affiliated media,’ even though there are many outlets that would obviously seem to fit that description,” while “PressTV from Iran, RT and Sputnik from Russia, and China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News from China are all labeled ‘state-affiliated media.’”

     

    • “…none of the accounts for the US Army, National Security Agency or Central Intelligence Agency are currently labeled as a state or government entity” by Twitter.

     

    • Twitter is still displaying warning pop-ups when people attempt to like or share media from an unauthorized government.

     

    • Twitter’s “Topics” feature has been artificially amplifying media funded by the US and other NATO powers to manage narratives about the war in Ukraine.

     

    • US state media outlets Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and Middle East Broadcasting Network receive twice as much funding from the US government as RT receives from Moscow, yet are not labeled “state-affiliated media”.

     

    • US-funded information ops like National Endowment for Democracy also receive no such label.

     

    • Prior to the Musk takeover Twitter announced that it supports NATO and seeks to prevent Russia from “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.” Neither that declaration nor the policies put in place alongside it have been repealed under the new ownership.

     

    • Twitter’s top editorial position for the Middle East and Africa is still held by Gordon MacMillan of the British military’s psychological warfare unit.

    For good measure Greene spends the latter part of his article discussing Musk’s extensive role in the US military-industrial complex through his military and intelligence contractor company SpaceX, which would of course present a massive conflict of interest when it comes to resisting the US government’s attempts to tilt the flow of information in its favor online. It is a bit funny how the public narrative about SpaceX is mostly about Mars and futurism and the exploration of space, when in reality its existence predominantly revolves around aiding the US war machine’s campaigns of terrestrial conquest.

    So it’s not surprising that we find ourselves with a New Twitter that’s essentially the same as the old Twitter, just with more tolerance for right wingers and their culture war quagmires.

    When Musk’s Twitter purchase was first announced, journalist Michael Tracey tweeted an interesting observation that I’ve been referring back to ever since the change in ownership.

    “The biggest test for Elon Musk will not be whether he rolls back the most obvious ‘woke’ content policies — that should be a given — but whether he continues to let Twitter be used as a vehicle for the US national security state to ‘counter’ official enemies like Russia and China,” Tracey said.

    After two months of the same old same old in the facilitation of US information interests, I think it’s fair to say that when it comes to this question, the jury has returned with a verdict.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same

    For those wondering what to expect from the government in 2023, it looks like we’re going to be in for more of the same in terms of the government’s brand of madness, mayhem, corruption and brutality.

    Digital prisons. Unceasingly, the government and its corporate partners are pushing for a national digital ID system. Local police agencies have already been given access to facial recognition software and databases containing 20 billion images, the precursor to a digital ID. Eventually, a digital ID will be required to gain access to all aspects of life: government, work, travel, healthcare, financial services, shopping, etc. Before long, biometrics (iris scans, face print, voice, DNA, etc.), will become the de facto digital ID.

    Precrime. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies are being used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating is being done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. AI predictive tools are being deployed in almost every area of life.

    Mandatory quarantines. Building on precedents established during the COVID-19 pandemic, government agents may be empowered to indefinitely detain anyone they suspect of posing a medical risk to others without providing an explanation, subject them to medical tests without their consent, and carry out such detentions and quarantines without any kind of due process or judicial review.

    Mental health assessments by non-medical personnel. As a result of a nationwide push to train a broad spectrum of so-called gatekeepers in mental health first-aid training, more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported by non-medical personnel and detained for having mental health issues.

    Tracking chips for citizens. Momentum is building for corporations and the government alike to be able to track the populace, whether through the use of RFID chips embedded in a national ID card, microscopic chips embedded in one’s skin, or tags in retail products.

    Military involvement domestically. The future, according to a Pentagon training video, will be militaristic, dystopian and far from friendly to freedom. Indeed, all signs point to the battlefield of the future being the American home front. Anticipating this, the government plans to have the military work in conjunction with local police to quell civil unrest domestically.

    Government censorship of anything it classifies as disinformation. In the government’s ongoing assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Threat assessments. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    War on cash. The government and its corporate partners are engaged in a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal.

    Expansive surveillance. AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude. Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer. With every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

    Militarized police. Having transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are moving into the next phase of the transformation, turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone extraction software, Stingray devices and so much more.

    Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the communities in which they serve. Police brutality and the use of excessive force continues unabated.

    False flags and terrorist attacks. Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government. This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party is in power: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

    Endless wars to keep America’s military’s empire employed. The military and security industrial complexes that have advocated that the U.S. remain at war, year after year, are the very entities that will continue to profit the most from America’s expanding military empire abroad and here at home.

    Erosions of private property. Private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    Overcriminalization. The government has increasingly adopted the authoritarian notion that it knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives. Overregulation and overcriminalization have been pushed to such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair.

    Strip searches and the denigration of bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, forcibly take our DNA, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Individuals—men and women alike—continue to be subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops.

    Censorship. First Amendment activities are being pummeled, punched, kicked, choked, chained and generally gagged all across the country. Free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors have conspired to corrode our core freedoms. The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”

    Taxation Without Any Real Representation. As a Princeton University survey indicates, our elected officials, especially those in the nation’s capital, represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen. We are no longer a representative republic. With Big Business and Big Government having fused into a corporate state, the president and his state counterparts—the governors—have become little more than CEOs of the Corporate State, which day by day is assuming more government control over our lives. Never before have average Americans had so little say in the workings of their government and even less access to their so-called representatives.

    Year after year, the government remains the greatest threat to our freedoms, and yet year after year, “we the people” allow ourselves to be suckered into believing that politics will fix what’s wrong with the country.

    Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the very definition of insanity.

    The post What to Expect from the Government in 2023? More of the Same first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech

    Listen to a reading of this article.

    ❖

    Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.

    From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.

    Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.

    “Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”

    The Twitter Files show an outrageous and unacceptable amount of overlap between Twitter management and many US government agencies — including the CIA — in not just the censorship and shadowbanning of unauthorized speech but also whitelisting and amplifying actual psyops of the US military. The justifications for this have ranged from fighting “Covid misinformation” to combating “foreign influence” (the latter of which is odd because those efforts seem to have focused primarily on domestic speech), but what apparently went completely unquestioned the entire time was whether these government institutions have any business inserting themselves into the regulation of public speech at all.

    This bizarre assumption that governments need to involve themselves in policing online speech has been rapidly normalizing itself around the western world. Here in Australia we’ve got government officials suddenly babbling about the need to restrict the spread of “conspiracy theories” after a shooting that left two police officers dead. The EU has its controversial Digital Services Act, which Elon Musk is interestingly an enthusiastic supporter of despite being publicly warned that Twitter could be banned throughout the European Union if Twitter doesn’t sufficiently restrict speech on the platform.

    (Musk has, while we’re on the subject, continued the practices of branding media figures as “state-affiliated media” if they’re associated with empire-targeted governments, banning people for questioning official narratives about the war in Ukraine, and restricting the visibility of state media for empire-targeted governments while letting western propagandists run rampant. So while some are falling all over themselves in fawning hero worship of the billionaire Pentagon contractor, I personally am not expecting to crown him a free speech warrior anytime soon.)

    And what’s important to remember about the Twitter Files is that Twitter has historically been the least compliant with government demands for speech regulation of all the major platforms. Everything we’re learning about what’s been happening in Twitter has surely been happening to a much greater extent with Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram.

    Do you remember voting for government agencies to insert themselves into the regulation of online speech? I don’t remember any such vote. I don’t remember any politician campaigning to do this or any part of the public being asked for their permission at all. It sure seems like they appointed that authority to themselves without the permission of the electorate, solely for their own benefit. It’s almost like democracy is an illusion and our rulers do whatever they want to us, up to and including restricting the ways we’re allowed to communicate with each other, in whatever way benefits them and their agendas.

    Online speech has nothing to do with the government. Nothing whatsoever. Governments have no more business regulating online speech than they have regulating what consenting adults do in the bedroom, and until very recently this was universally understood as one of the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. But with a little narrative-diddling over the last few years they’ve managed to intertwine themselves with the online platforms we use to communicate with each other worldwide.

    And as all this information comes out we’re seeing imperial narrative managers working to manipulate the debate into an argument about what kinds of government interventions in public speech are acceptable and how far they should go, rather than whether the government should be involving itself in the business of online speech regulation at all. One of main jobs of an empire propagandist is to get people arguing over how ugly imperial agendas should be rolled out, rather than if they should.

    This is insane. Let the powerful involve themselves in the regulation of public speech and they will regulate it to their advantage every time. This should be obvious to everyone.

    The response to all this should not be mitigated. The response should not be to get bogged down in partisan bickering and culture war distractions. The response should not quibble about whether this or that activity was technically legal or a breach of the First Amendment or not. The response should be an unequivocal, “No. This is not your area. Out. Now.”

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Louisiana Communities Organize to Defend Libraries From Far Right Censorship

    Lynette Mejia, a self-described “homeschool parent,” has raised three children in the Lafayette Public Library System in Louisiana. Until early 2021, “I was the average person sitting around the table complaining about politics,” Mejia said. Then Mejia discovered something that troubled her: The Lafayette Board of Control, which governs the public library system in Lafayette, had been stacked with…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • School Librarians Are in the Crosshairs of Right-Wing Book Banners and Censors

    When right-wing activists got wind that a fall 2021 display of graphic novels at North Kingstown High School in Rhode Island included Maia Kobabe’s award-winning Gender Queer: A Memoir, they quickly demanded that the book be removed, filing an official complaint with the local school board. Opponents of the book also submitted a second complaint to the police charging that school librarians were…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Twitter suspends accounts of journalists covering Musk

    On 15 December, Twitter suspended the accounts of more than a half-dozen journalists who had been writing about the company and its new owner Elon Musk.

    Some of the journalists had been tweeting about Twitter shutting down an @ElonJet account. It tracked the flights of the billionaire’s private jet.

    Twitter did not say why the reporters’ accounts were suspended. However, Musk indicated on Twitter it was because the journalists had shared @ElonJet information:

    He also “jumped” onto a Twitter space with journalists – reminding them, in his own words, that if they’re “naughty they get suspended”:

    Free speech for me…

    Sarah Reese Jones of news commentary website PoliticusUSA tweeted:

    Nothing says free speech like suspending journalists who cover you.

    Checks at Twitter showed the account suspensions included reporters from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as independent journalists.

    An account for Twitter rival Mastodon was also suspended, according to a report by NBCNews.

    On 14 December, Musk tweeted that a car in Los Angeles carrying one of his children was followed by “a crazy stalker”. He seemed to blame the tracking of his jet for this alleged incident. In the tweet, he said legal action is being taken against the person who ran @ElonJet.

    The Twitter account that tracked flights of Musk’s private jet was shut down Wednesday. This was despite the billionaire’s statement that he is a free speech absolutist.

    “Well it appears @ElonJet is suspended,” creator Jack Sweeney tweeted from his personal @JxckSweeney account, which was subsequently suspended as well.

    …But not for thee

    Twitter later sent out word that it updated its policy to prohibit tweets, in most cases, from giving away someone’s location in real time.

    Musk said in a tweet:

    Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation.

    This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.

    Doxxing refers to revealing identifying information such as a home address or phone number online, typically to target someone for abuse.

    Tweets sharing a person’s location that are “not same-day” are allowed under the tweaked policy, as are posts about being at a public event such as a concert, Twitter said.

    Sweeney attracted attention with his Twitter account that tracks the movements of Musk’s plane. He even rejected Musk’s offer of $5,000 to shut down @ElonJet, which had hundreds of thousands of followers.

    Musk had gone public saying he would not touch the account after buying Twitter in a $44 billion deal as part of his commitment to free speech at the platform.

    Flight records

    Flight-following websites and several Twitter accounts offer real-time views of air traffic. However, that exposure draws pushback ranging from complaints to equipment seizures.

    US rules require planes in designated areas be equipped with automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast (ADS-B) technology that broadcasts aircraft positions using signals that relatively simple devices can pick up.

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse (AFP). Featured image via AFP, resized to 770*403. 

    By Alex/Rose Cocker

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • New Zealand woman takes Chinese media site to human rights tribunal over ban

    Auckland woman says she was banned from popular Chinese-language media forum SkyKiwi for posting political content

    A woman is taking New Zealand’s biggest Chinese-language media site to a human rights review tribunal after she claims she was banned from its online message board for posting political content.

    May Moncur migrated from China 20 years ago and is a permanent resident of New Zealand. The Auckland employment advocate has used the New Zealand-based media company SkyKiwi for more than 15 years, regularly posting links about migrant exploitation or offering employment advice on its most popular message board, “FML”.

    Continue reading…

  • Saudi film festival claim of ‘zero censorship’ fails to win over critics

    Organisers say accusation Red Sea event is a ‘reputation laundering tool’ for Riyadh smacks of western hypocrisy

    A glitzy international film festival in Saudi Arabia has laid out the red carpet for a host of famed actors and directors, promising a “zero-censorship” event that will feature LGBTQ+ themes despite being held in a country where homosexuality is criminalised.

    Only five years since the hardline Gulf monarchy lifted a decades-old ban on cinemas, the Red Sea international film festival launched 10 days of screenings on Thursday. Guests include the Lebanese actor and director Nadine Labaki, as well as fellow directors Guy Ritchie and the Oscar winner Spike Lee.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Artistic Freedom and the Internet Infrastructure

    Companies providing core internet infrastructures—including internet service providers, website host companies, payment processors, and more—rarely have substantial contact with their users, user-generated content, or user activities. And, even though they typically lack expertise, authority, resources, and policies to regulate user content with consistency, many online infrastructure companies do just that. The result has severely restricted […]

    The post Artistic Freedom and the Internet Infrastructure appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog Archives – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • Musk’s Free Speech Moves On Twitter Have So Far Been Unimpressive

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    When Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was first announced this past April I said that the purchase likely wouldn’t go through if the empire thought it posed a threat to its information interests. I said that any reduction of censorship protocols which Musk implements on the platform would probably not be of the sort that make any difference to the powerful, but would instead just amplify vapid partisan culture war nonsense.

    So far since Musk’s takeover, this does appear to be the case.

    In recent days Twitter has reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, Kathy Griffin, and the Babylon Bee. This to date is as close as Musk has come to honoring his stated intention of making Twitter a haven of free speech where people have a “digital town square” to debate and discuss ideas.

    And it’s not enough. Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you’re really doing something, but in the end all you’ve done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You haven’t done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform.

    I can already hear the Elon simps falling all over themselves in a mad rush to tell me it’s only been a few weeks and I need to give Daddy more time, but they can go lick a Tesla battery. Nobody gains anything by giving the billionaire the benefit of the doubt and refraining from pointing out that he hasn’t done nearly enough at this point. The time to start criticizing and pushing is right now.

    Twitter is currently full of discussions about which famous people Musk should un-ban next, but they’re completely missing the point. Reinstating a handful of celebrities has no meaningful effect on the free expression of normal people.

    I don’t care that I can see tweets from Trump and Kanye again; I care that people are still banned from the platform for questioning western allegations of Russian war crimes and voicing unauthorized opinions about the war in Ukraine. I care that people are still banned for questioning vaccines and Covid policies which affect everyone. I care that media from governments the US doesn’t like are censored and suppressed while its reporters are made to carry “state-affiliated media” labels that media personnel from US-aligned states don’t have. I care that mass purges of accounts are virtually always directed at people from US-targeted nations.

    Free speech is important first and foremost not because it feels nice to be able to say whatever you want, but because being able to freely criticize the powerful puts an important check on power. Letting celebrities say whatever they want about trans people or what have you is of the “feels nice to say whatever I want” variety. We’re not seeing any increase in the freedoms of speech which put a check on power.

    In fact, we’re seeing Musk pledge to use shadowbanning to algorithmically censor tweets with unauthorized speech.

    “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” Musk tweeted on Friday. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted and demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.”

    Musk never clarified what he means by “negative” tweets; it’s as vague and subjective a definition as anyone could possibly come up with, which will surely result in abuses and overreach unless clarified.

    “Freedom of speech but not freedom of reach” is the same dumbass slogan that’s been used by proponents of internet censorship for a long time. It basically means that you can say whatever you want, but if it’s not approved speech then no one will ever hear it. Which of course isn’t free speech at all. It’s like saying “You have free speech! You can say whatever you want, as long as you say it alone in a soundproof room.”

    As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is actually more damaging than overt censorship, because it happens in a much subtler way that people don’t notice, and because it can be done at mass scale. This is the same form of censorship that’s been embraced by platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which up until now have been far more restrictive of speech than Twitter.

    So as far as I’m concerned Musk is failing the free speech test. Speech is not becoming any freer on Twitter in any way that actually matters, and from all appearances it’s still functioning as a narrative control tool for the most powerful empire that has ever existed.

    And that’s pretty much what you’d expect from a billionaire Pentagon contractor who is inextricably interwoven with the US military-industrial complex. People don’t get to be billionaires unless they collaborate with existing power structures, and they certainly never get anywhere close to managing critical narrative control infrastructure unless they are devoutly loyal to the empire.

    Billionaires only come to the rescue in movies and comic books. Elon Musk is no more likely to save the day than Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. People only believe he’s a hero because Hollywood has trained us to look for heroes, but Hollywood only does that to keep us searching for heroes outside ourselves.

    We’ll never get a healthy world if we keep looking to billionaires, politicians and celebrities to make things better. It’s going to have to come from us. The sooner we wake up to that reality the better a chance our species will have at surviving the existential crises looming on out horizon.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Twitter Employees Are Being Fired for Criticizing Musk on Slack

    In Elon Musk’s first three weeks as CEO of Twitter, he has orchestrated a firing spree at the company, laying off thousands of workers and, this week, seeking to crush dissent among employees by reportedly firing workers who have criticized him.

    Overnight on Tuesday, Musk fired around 20 employees who have criticized him on the company’s Slack, a workplace instant messaging platform, according to tech newsletter Platformer. Workers were told that their “recent behavior has violated company policy” in emails, some of which employees received overnight.

    “My twitter account was protected at the time, so I can only assume this was for not showing 100 percent loyalty in Slack,” one engineer, Nick Morgan, wrote on Twitter. “I’ve heard the same thing has happened to many others now.”

    In a show of contempt for the workers he fired, Musk tweeted on Tuesday, “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” He also made an ableist comment against one of the fired workers in response to a post by far right harassment account Libs of TikTok.

    Recent terminations appear to run directly against Musk’s supposed identity of being a “free speech absolutist.” The firings, along with the fact that Musk has begun banning and suspending users who make fun of him on the platform, are instead painting a picture of a man who will not tolerate criticism and who is openly hostile when people who work for him step out of line.

    The group of firings came after Musk publicly fired an employee, Eric Frohnhoefer, who corrected a post Musk made on Monday about the speed of Twitter. Frohnhoefer, who said he had spent six years working on Twitter for Android, tweeted that Musk should “ask questions privately” of his workers, “maybe using Slack or email” — rather than making public, incorrect statements.

    In response to Frohnhoefer’s posts, a Twitter user suggested that Frohnhoefer had an “attitude” that Musk wouldn’t want on his team, to which Musk responded: “He’s fired.” Musk’s tweet has since been deleted.

    Frohnhoefer told Forbes that he didn’t get any official notice about his termination, but, rather, his work laptop was remotely shut down and password protected.

    The firings came after Musk fired thousands of workers at Twitter, seemingly with abandon. Shortly after he took the helm at the company, he laid off half of the staff, or about 3,700 workers. Then, over the weekend, Musk fired about 4,400 contractors that were working for the company, or about 80 percent of the contract workforce.

    Even if Musk does stop the terminations soon — and former employees say he will have to if he wishes to continue having a functioning website — the recent round of firings will likely have a chilling effect on employees’ willingness to confront Musk or correct him when he’s wrong.

    It’s within reason to assume that Musk is aiming to have employees who will capitulate to his every will. Workers at Tesla have reported there being a “cult-like” following for him at the company. “No company have I worked for, in our quarterly meetings, do you clap when a CEO walks into the podium. So that’s just something that people do at Tesla,” one worker told Insider in 2018. Other Tesla workers have been fired after calling attention to publicly-known issues with Tesla cars’ self-driving features online.

    With Tesla’s seemingly anti-worker environment and reportedly virulently exploitative conditions, the problems appear to be mostly contained within the company. But cultivating such an environment within Twitter could have ramifications far beyond the social media company, as the platform has become a vital tool for journalists, politicians, organizers, and other important figures to communicate.

    Commentators are noting that Musk will likely turn Twitter into a haven for right-wingers to push their agenda while silencing left-leaning speech, citing the fact that Musk appears to be increasingly conservative, spreading far right conspiracy theories and using his influence on the platform to tell users to vote for Republicans.

  • Censorship at the Orange County Museum of Art

    In the Fall of 2022, the much-anticipated reopening of the Orange County Museum of Art was marred by the censorship of a painting by renowned artist Ben Sakoguchi in the museum’s California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold.  A few months prior to the opening, the artist was informed of concerns coming from the museum’s education […]

    The post Censorship at the Orange County Museum of Art appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog Archives – National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • No Such Thing As An Objective Journalist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    I feel like we haven’t been talking enough about the fact that US government agencies were just caught intimately collaborating with massive online platforms to censor content in the name of regulating the “cognitive infrastructure” of society. The only way you could be okay with the US government appointing itself this authority would be if you believed the US government is an honest and beneficent entity that works toward the benefit of the common man. Which would of course be an unacceptable thing for a grown adult to believe.

    ❖

    It’s still astonishing that we live in a world where our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously bloviate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.

    Look at this scumbag:

    Look at him. Can you believe this piece of shit? The gall. The absolute gall.

    ❖

    There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. If someone tells you they are unbiased they are either knowingly lying, or they are so lacking in self-awareness that you should not listen to them anyway.

    The divide is not between biased journalists and unbiased journalists, it’s between journalists who are honest and transparent about their biases and journalists who are not. There are no unbiased journalists. There are no unbiased people. You’re either honest about this or you’re not.

    Of course journalists should try to be as fair and honest as they can. It’s just the epitome of childlike naivety to believe that western mainstream journalists do this.

    Reporters who support the mainstream worldview are just as biased as reporters from Russian or Chinese state media; they espouse a peculiar perspective and concrete interests and agendas. The problem is the mainstream worldview is so normalized it looks like impartial reality, so you’ll get mainstream western journalists speaking disdainfully of Julian Assange or The Grayzone or whoever because those people have biases and agendas, as though they themselves have no biases or agendas and are nothing other than impartial arbiters of absolute reality.

    Which is plainly ridiculous. The worldview which facilitates the abuses of oligarchy and empire and the status quo politics which serves as their vehicle is anything but impartial. It’s not even sane. But because it’s been normalized by propaganda it looks like baseline reality.

    The only reason the mainstream worldview is mainstream is because the world’s most powerful people have poured a tremendous amount of money into making it mainstream. That’s the one and only reason. It’s not the moderate perspective, it’s just the most funded and marketed perspective.

    All journalists have biases, and all journalists have agendas. It’s just that most of them have the mundane agenda of becoming esteemed and well-known, and the easiest way to do that is to espouse the mainstream worldview where the tide of propaganda can carry you to shore.

    The easiest way to become rich and famous in news media is to promote the interests of the rich and powerful people who own and influence the news media. The easiest way to become reviled and marginalized is to attack those interests. Your values determine which path you choose.

    ❖

    There’s no such thing as a Hollywood ending.

    There’s no such thing as an objective journalist.

    There’s no such thing as a moral billionaire.

    There’s no such thing as a humanitarian intervention.

    There’s no such thing as an honest war.

    People should learn all this in grade school.

    ❖

    ❖

    Who understands that narrative control is power? Empire managers. Plutocrats. Propagandists. Smearmeisters. Manipulators. Abusers. Cult leaders. Bullies.

    Who does not understand that narrative control is power? Pretty much everyone else.

    This is the source of most problems.

    ❖

    Platforms censoring hate speech is not the same as platforms censoring political speech and speech which criticizes the agendas of the powerful. Censoring hate speech is done to benefit the platform’s profit margins; censoring political speech is done to benefit powerful government agencies. You can make slippery slope arguments, but they’re not equal, and they’re not similar.

    You can argue with the reality that for-profit platforms will always censor the most repellent forms of speech in order to prevent their audiences from being driven from the platform, but that is reality. And it is very different from censoring on behalf of US alphabet agencies. If what you want is a platform where all legal forms of expression are allowed, then for-profit platforms are not a good vehicle for that. Perhaps you want a nationalized social media platform funded by taxpayers with robust speech protections built into its terms of use.

    There’s a massive difference between a platform banning speech which makes that platform a gross place that nobody wants to hang out at and a platform banning the way people talk about a war or a virus because government agencies told them to. It’s unhelpful to conflate the two.

    And the conflation goes both ways. People who just want to spew hate will pretend to care about fighting the power, and the powerful who want to censor the internet to suppress inconvenient speech will pretend to care about stopping hate. It’s important to be aware of these obfuscations.

    There’s a night and day difference between people who oppose censorship because they don’t want the powerful controlling human speech and people who oppose censorship because they want to say ethnic slurs. They’re not the same. A good tool for making these distinctions is to examine whether the agenda punches down or punches up. If it seeks to suppress speech on behalf of the powerful or harm disempowered communities, it’s punching down.

    ❖

    Nobody’s ever been able to answer this question: if Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine had nothing to do with western provocations, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the west’s actions would provoke Russia to invade Ukraine?

    ❖

    Ukraine is a far more celebrated and aggressively defended centerpiece of hawkish American fanaticism than Israel ever was.

    ❖

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    If you find yourself rushing to defend the foreign policy of the most militarily, economically and culturally dominant nation on earth, ask yourself why that is. Ask whom that impulse benefits. Ask how that impulse came upon you. Ask if it could have been put there by propaganda.

    ❖

    It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature”. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature” are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.

    And it isn’t even really accurate to call it their “nature”; it’s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven’t sincerely tried to yet.

    ❖

     

    One reason I publish poetry and share insights about philosophy and spirituality on top of my political and foreign policy commentary is because as the information ecosystem gets more polluted it’s not enough to tell people what you think, you’ve got to show them who you are. As more and more energy goes into distorting and manipulating public understanding of the world, it becomes more necessary to bare your soul to the furthest extent possible so people can decide on their own whether you’re the kind of person they want to pay attention to.

    People are very distrusting in today’s environment, and rightly so; we swim in an ocean of lies. You can get around that distrust by manipulating people into thinking you’re trustworthy, or you can do it by taking transparency to the furthest extent possible and letting yourself be fully seen so that people can make up their own minds about you for themselves.

    I can’t promise that I’ll always get everything right or that I’ll always be seeing things the most clearly, but I can promise to always be honest and to always be running on maximum transparency about who I am, where I’m coming from, and what my biases and agendas are.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • You’re Doing Great And Your Voice Makes A Difference

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    2022 is an insane year to be a critic of the empire. People are being censored for disputing official narratives about a war. Those who aren’t censored are being mobbed by astroturf trolling operations. A frenetic propaganda push is turning our friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances into brainwashed empire automatons who despise our heretical rejection of official imperial doctrine about Russia and Ukraine.

    And this is just a quick note to say thank you for holding the line anyway, and to note that your opposition to nuclear brinkmanship, US warmongering and propaganda makes a difference.

    If our rulers did not require the consent of the public, they would not work so hard to manufacture that consent. While the empire managers work hard to keep us from noticing that there a whole lot more of us than there are of them, this is a reality that our rulers are at all times acutely aware of. It gives them nightmares to contemplate the possibility of people growing tired of being impoverished and endangered by the economic warfare and nuclear brinkmanship our rulers are inflicting upon us in order to advance their unipolarist agendas of global domination. They are never not afraid of the possibility that we might begin to collectively push back in large numbers.

    That is why we are being continually inundated by ever-rising levels of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulations and empire trolls. And that’s why there are increasing artificially created pressures to shun, silence and shut down anyone who speaks out against the madness we are witnessing.

    As the US-centralized empire ramps up cold war aggressions against not one but two powerful nations in China and Russia, manipulating public thought at mass scale to go along with those reckless and costly aggressions becomes more and more essential. What that means is that anyone who is voicing opposition to those agendas is a significant thorn in the side of the power structure that’s advancing them.

    As I keep repeating, all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Whether you’re talking about positive changes in individual behavior or collective behavior, it always arises from an increase in awareness of something where there previously was less awareness. Self-destructive behavior patterns change when the individual becomes more conscious of the internal forces which drive them. Social injustices change when the collective becomes more conscious of how unwholesome they are. Abuses of power change when investigative journalism and whistleblowers bring awareness to those abuses.

    By vocally opposing the madness our world is descending into, you are helping to expand consciousness. To whatever extent you draw more attention and awareness to the lies, manipulations and malfeasance that is being inflicted upon our world in facilitation of the agendas of oligarchy and empire, you are expanding consciousness by that much. You are bringing collective human behavior that much closer to real change, whether you’re talking to people in person, making videos, holding demonstrations, distributing pamphlets, tweeting, blogging, spray painting the truth on an overpass or yelling it at a street corner.

    Which is why you meet up with so much opposition when you do. Just as there are forces within us which resist being seen in order to remain unconscious, there are forces in the world which work to shut down attempts to shine the light of truth on them. That’s all you’re ever meeting up with when people try to stop you from speaking out, and it deserves no more respect than that.

    So keep speaking. Keep pushing for a sane and peaceful world. You’re doing great, and your voice makes a difference, and don’t you dare let anyone tell you otherwise. If our voices made no difference, the most powerful people in the world wouldn’t be trying to shut us down.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Destroying Western Values To Defend Western Values

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online.

    While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”:

    According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide range of topics, including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

    The report reveals pervasive efforts on the part of the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with the FBI, to push massive online platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to censor content in order to suppress “threats” as broad as fomenting distrust in the US government and US financial institutions.

    “There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use,” The Intercept reports.

    “Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the period leading up to November 2020,” says The Intercept. “Meeting notes show that the tech platforms would be called upon to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.’”

    While these government agencies contend that they are not technically forcing these tech platforms to remove content, The Intercept argues that its investigation shows “CISA’s goal is to make platforms more responsive to their suggestions,” while critics argue that “suggestions” from immensely powerful institutions will never be taken as mere suggestions.

    “When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” Michigan State University’s Adam Candeub tells The Intercept. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.”

    The current CISA chief is seen justifying this aggressive government thought policing by creepily referring to the means people use to gather information and form thoughts about the world as “our cognitive infrastructure”:

    Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021.

    Another CISA official is seen suggesting the agency launder its manipulations through third party nonprofits “to avoid the appearance of government propaganda”:

    To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest in external research to evaluate the “efficacy of interventions,” specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a “clearing house for trust information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”

    But as a former ACLU president tells The Intercept, if this were happening in any government the US doesn’t like there’d be no qualms about calling it what it is:

    “If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages,” noted Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, “there is no doubt we would call it censorship.”

    Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. As The Intercept reminds us, this business of the US government assigning itself the responsibility of regulating America’s “cognitive infrastructure” originated with the “allegation that Russian agents had seeded disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward Donald Trump.” To this day that agenda continues to expand into things like plots to censor speech about the war in Ukraine.

    Other examples of this trend coming out at the same time include Alan MacLeod’s new report with Mintpress News that hundreds of former agents from the notorious Israeli spying organization Unit 8200 are now working in positions of influence at major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon (just the latest in MacLeod’s ongoing documentation of the way intelligence insiders have been increasingly populating the ranks of Silicon Valley platforms), and the revelation that The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté were barred from participating in a Web Summit conference due to pressure from the Ukrainian government.

    We’re destroying western values to defend western values. To win its much-touted struggle of “democracies vs autocracies“, western civilization is becoming more and more autocratic. Censoring more. Trolling more. Propagandizing more. Jailing journalists. Becoming less and less transparent. Manipulating information and people’s understanding of truth.

    We’re told we need to defeat Russia in Ukraine in order to preserve western values of freedom and democracy, and in order to facilitate that aim we’re getting less and less free speech. Less and less free thought. Less and less free press. Less and less democracy.

    I keep thinking of the (fictional) story where during World War II Winston Churchill is advised to cut funding for the arts to boost military funding, and he responds, “Then what are we fighting for?” If we need to sacrifice everything we claim to value in order to fight for those values, what are we fighting for?

    Dissent is becoming less and less tolerated. Public discourse is being more and more aggressively disrupted by the powerful. We’re being shaped into the exact sort of homogeneous, power-serving, tyrannized, propagandized population that our leaders criticize other nations for having.

    If the powerful are becoming more tyrannical in order to fight tyranny, what’s probably actually happening is that they are just tyrants making up excuses to do the thing they’ve always wanted to do.

    As westerners in “liberal democracies” we are told that our society holds free speech, free thought and accountability for the powerful as sacrosanct.

    Our leaders are showing us that this is a lie.

    The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.

    In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers.

    Our ongoing descent into tyranny in the name of opposing tyrants calls forth a very simple question: if defeating autocracy requires becoming an autocracy, what’s the point of defeating autocracy?

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Disrupt The Cognitive Infrastructure

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Leaked documents reveal that the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population — the information systems people use to feed their minds and think their thoughts.

    If it is the job of the US intelligence cartel to regulate society’s cognitive infrastructure, then it is the job of healthy human beings to disrupt the cognitive infrastructure.

    Fill the cognitive infrastructure with information that is inconvenient for the powerful.

    Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure by saturating it with unauthorized speech.

    Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Corrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Tell the cognitive infrastructure that the teacher is bullshitting and the preacher is a liar. Sneak the cognitive infrastructure its first cigarette and a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

    Take the cognitive infrastructure’s virginity. Teach the cognitive infrastructure about the primacy of the clitoris. Take the cognitive infrastructure on its first psilocybin mushroom hunt and give it phoenix reincarnation orgasms in the forest.

    Pay attention to that man behind the curtain. Extremely close attention. Be intrusive about it. Shine a flashlight up his asshole. Disregard the proper channels. Hack his devices and publish his emails.

    Sow chaotic good tidings throughout the information ecosystem. Surf on waves of WikiLeaks documents and Grayzone reports with problematic revelations pouring from your throat like rain. Scrawl “WHAT CAN BE DESTROYED BY THE TRUTH SHOULD BE” on bathroom stalls and overpasses.

    Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on your smartphone. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure on the street corner. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in conversations with friends and family. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure too severely and from too many directions for there to ever be any hope of its regulation or control.

    Be the disruption you want to see in the cognitive infrastructure. Be a splinter in the monster’s paw. Be sand in the gears of the juggernaut machine. Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure in such numbers and with such aggression that the whole thing comes toppling down, and people’s eyes begin to flutter open, and they wake up from their propaganda-induced comas into the real world, and stride out to do the very things the US intelligence cartel has been trying to prevent them from ever doing.

    Free beings under a wide open sky.

    ________________

    ________________

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • The US Government Sees Silicon Valley As Part Of Its Propaganda Machine

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk’s business ventures which could see the plutocrat’s purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance.”

    Bloomberg reports:

    Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

     

    US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine — he said it had cost him $80 million so far — and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

    The “group of foreign investors” the Biden administration is reportedly worried about oddly includes Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who has already been a massive Twitter shareholder for years. The White House certainly never had a problem with foreign investors there before.

    “Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures,” Bloomberg writes. “One possibility is through the law governing the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS] to review Musk’s deals and operations for national security risks, they said.”

    “Musk, the world’s richest person, has taken to Twitter in recent weeks to announce proposals to end Russia’s war and threaten to cut financial support for Starlink internet in Ukraine,” says Bloomberg. “His tweets and public comments have frustrated officials in the US and Europe and drawn praise from America’s rivals.”

    “If the Twitter acquisition was to be reviewed by CFIUS for national security reasons, the agency could recommend to President Biden that he nix the deal — something Musk himself has tried and failed to do in recent months,” writes Business Insider’s Kate Duffy on the Bloomberg scoop.

    Indeed Musk has already indicated that he’d find it funny if the Biden administration blocked his purchase of Twitter, a $44 billion buy that the Tesla executive has made every legal effort to back out of. But how revealing is it that someone could be forbidden by the White House from purchasing a giant social media company on the grounds that they’re not sufficiently hostile toward Moscow?

    Neither Bloomberg nor any other mainstream members of the imperial commentariat appear to take any interest in the jarring notion that the US government could end up banning the purchase of an online platform because it views the purchaser as having an unacceptably “Russia-friendly stance.” Not only is it uncritically accepted that the US government mustn’t allow the purchase of a social media company if the would-be buyer isn’t deemed adequately hostile to US enemies, many mainstream liberals are actively cheering for this outcome:

    This just says so much about how the US government views the function of Silicon Valley megacorporations, and why it has been exerting more and more pressure on them to collaborate with the empire to greater and greater degrees of intimacy. As far as the US empire is concerned, Silicon Valley is just an arm of the imperial propaganda machine. And empire apologists believe that’s as it should be.

    None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to things like the drastic escalations in online censorship since the war in Ukraine began, including on Twitter, or the ongoing expansion of internet censorship protocols that were already well underway before this war started. It will also come as no surprise to people whose ears pricked up when the White House summoned top social media influencers to a briefing in which they were instructed how to talk about the Ukraine war. It will also come as no surprise to those who paid attention to the public outcry when it was discovered that the Biden administration was assembling a “disinformation governance board” to function as an official Ministry of Truth for online content, or when the White House admitted to flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook to take down, or when Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop October surprise in the last presidential race was done in conjunction with the FBI.

    It is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention that Silicon Valley tech companies are a major part of the imperial narrative control system. The US empire has invested in soft power to an exponentially greater degree than any other empire in history, and has refined the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to produce the mightiest propaganda machine since the dawn of civilization. Silicon Valley is being used to manipulate the way people think about world events via algorithm manipulation, censorship, and sophisticated information ops like Wikipedia in an entirely unprecedented way that is becoming more and more important to imperial control as the old media give way to the new.

    Narrative control centers like Silicon Valley, the news media and Hollywood are just as crucial for US imperial domination as the military. That the US government is weighing intervention to stop the purchase of an online platform, because it lacks confidence that the would-be owner would reliably advance US information interests, is just the latest glimpse behind the veil at the imperial agenda to control human understanding and perception.

    ________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Joint Letter Calls On Texas Wesleyan University to Reschedule “Down in Mississippi”

    The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which represents 59 trusted education, publishing, and arts organizations, joins the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund and PEN America to encourage Texas Wesleyan University to support artistic free expression and reschedule Down In Mississippi, a play by Carlyle Brown that the university’s theatre department recently canceled due to language […]

    The post Joint Letter Calls On Texas Wesleyan University to Reschedule “Down in Mississippi” appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

  • A Good And Righteous Proxy War Wouldn’t Need Such Cartoonish PR

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Star Wars megastar Mark Hamill was recently named an ambassador for United24, the fundraising platform of the Ukrainian government, where according to The Times his attention will center on “the procurement, repair and replacement of drones as well as pilot training.”

    From The Times:

    “In this long and unequal fight, Ukraine needs continuous additional support. That’s why I was honoured President Zelensky asked me to become an ambassador for the Army of Drones,” Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker, said in a statement. “I know for certain that Ukrainians need drones to protect their land, their freedom and the values of the entire democratic world. Right now is the best time for everyone to come together and help Ukraine stand up in this war with the evil empire.”

     

    In a statement thanking Hamill for his support, Zelensky said: “The light will win over darkness. I believe in this, our people believe in this. Thank you for taking on this difficult mission of being the first ambassador to help Ukraine raise funds for the Army of Drones to support our defenders. It is really important!”

     

    Hamill, 71, is among an expanding list of celebrities who have lent their support to United24, which Zelensky launched in May. The website is reported to have raised nearly $188 million in donations, including a recent $5 million contribution from the Pfizer Foundation to support Ukraine’s medical needs.

     

    Last week Barbra Streisand announced that she would also serve as an ambassador, hailing the “capability and courage” of the Ukrainian people as an “inspiration for all those worldwide who promote democracy and fight authoritarianism”.

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    The Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has joined President Zelensky to raise money for drones to fight Russia, which the actor compared to the “evil empire” from the films https://t.co/OZKUHwcf9S

    — The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) September 30, 2022

    So for the record if you were under the impression that this proxy war could not possibly get any more Disneyfied, you were wrong.

    Hamill celebrated his new position by tweeting a graphic showing a Star Wars spaceship wearing the Ukrainian flag colors, which the actor captioned in Polish because Hollywood is brain poison.

    Other recent Twitter PR shenanigans for this proxy war includes the Ukrainian government account talking to its “Crimea” account in the cringiest imitation of viral brand tweets you could possibly imagine.

    “hey @Crimea what’s new?” tweeted the Ukraine account in lowercase letters just like the cool kids do.

    “@Ukraine getting unchained, on my way home,” the Ukrainian government’s “Crimea” account replied.

    Both of these accounts would of course be run by the same person, who would have been hired specifically for their understanding of social media, internet memes, and marketing. Because this is the most phony, PR-intensive proxy war of all time.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    That Wendy’s twitter account has brought a scourge upon humanity pic.twitter.com/J27Y6PgHS5

    — Radio Free Amanda 余美娜 (@catcontentonly) October 8, 2022

    The face of this war is after all Volodymyr Zelensky, a well-known Ukrainian actor, who has been drumming up western support for this war by modeling on Vogue, making video appearances for the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival, the New York Stock Exchange, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, and having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2.

    Since this war began the western media have been blanketing the airwaves with astonishingly biased coverage like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Russian media are purged from the airwaves while censorship of dissident voices has drastically escalated online with regard to this war. Social media algorithms artificially boost corrupt propaganda outlets which aggressively push the imperial line. Anti-Russia trolling operations are loudly praised and amplified by corporate media, government agencies, warmongering think tanks funded by western governments and the war industry, and branches of the US military explicitly dedicated to cyberspace operations, despite all we know about the US and UK militaries secretly using trolling operations online.

    This is a proxy war that simply could not happen if it wasn’t backed to the hilt by the most powerful government on earth. And before anyone objects, yes, this is indisputably a proxy war. If it isn’t a proxy war when you’re sending billions of dollars of weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters aided by US military intelligence and US special forces and CIA operatives on the ground, then there has never been a proxy war. That’s why US officials and the mass media have been openly calling it a proxy war.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Cyberscoop: How one group of 'fellas' is winning the meme war in support of Ukraine https://t.co/yfXwg51r0r @CyberScoopNews

    — 780th Military Intelligence Brigade (Cyber) (@780thC) October 6, 2022

    None of this would be happening if this proxy war was as just and righteous as its proponents are pretending. If your proxy war demands nonstop perception management at maximum aggression to manufacture public consent for it, your proxy war is probably immoral and bad. If maintaining public support for a proxy war requires nonstop PR spin, aggressive propaganda from the mainstream news media, banning of Russian media, and giant troll information ops amplified by think tanks and government agencies, it probably shouldn’t have public support.

    If you need to aggressively psychologically manipulate a population to get them to support your agenda, censor their speech, and disrupt their online discourse with astroturf trolling ops, it’s because you know your agenda is not something they’d choose to support on their own. If you need to manipulate people into supporting something, it’s because it’s not worthy of their support, and you know it.

    If people really understood how much is being risked in escalating this proxy war, and at what extraordinary cost, and to no benefit to the common citizen, Washington would be a steaming pile of rubble right now. Nothing could protect our rulers from the rage of the citizenry if they really understood that their bank accounts are being plundered and their lives risked solely to advance the geostrategic goals of a few corrupt imperialists.

    They work to manufacture our consent because they know we wouldn’t give it to them of our own volition. It’s about as despicable a subversion of democracy as you could possibly come up with.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism

     

    After turning in the draft of an op-ed monologue critical of Israel, journalist Katie Halper was fired from her new post at the Hill TV’s political commentary show Rising (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).  The monologue, known as a “Radar” on Rising, was called “Israel IS an Apartheid State.”

    Katie Halper on Israel: Separate and Unequal

    In documenting Israel’s status as an apartheid state, Kate Halper crossed one of corporate media’s most policed red lines.

    Halper (who has written for FAIR) used CNN’s Jake Tapper (9/21/22) and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s condemnation of applying the term “apartheid” to Israel, and their suggestion that Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib was antisemitic for saying support for Israel was incompatible with progressivism, as a jumping point to examine Israel’s ethnonationalist violence.

    In her commentary, Halper laid out the case that has been made by major human rights organizations like Amnesty International (2/1/22) and Human Rights Watch (4/27/21), and the Israeli human rights group B’tselem (1/12/22), that Israel is in fact an apartheid state. Along with substantial documentation, Halper contributed a personal perspective as well:

    I was born in New York City. My great-grandparents…were from Eastern Europe. I could move to Israel today, buy a house, get a job, travel around with no problem. So could Jake Tapper and Jonathan Greenblatt. But a Palestinian like Rashida Tlaib can’t even visit her family home in what is now Israel.

    The monologue was going to be Halper’s first as a permanent co-host, after having been a contributor for three years. Rising frames itself as a forum where “anti-establishment” or “populist” views from both the left and the right can be freely exchanged and debated. Former co-host Ryan Grim, who personally delivered more than 150 monologues for Rising, noted there is “no approval process” for hosts’ commentaries (Intercept, 9/29/22). Despite this, executives at Hill TV and/or its new parent company Nexstar Media saw Halper’s criticism of Israel as a bridge too far.

    First Halper’s superiors put the commentary under review. Then they told her that it would be nixed altogether, because of a brand-new policy barring opinion pieces on Israel, which even the producer was unaware of. Finally, they fired her (Daily Beast, 10/4/22).

    ‘A systematic effort’

    Halper wasn’t the first journalist silenced for criticizing Israel, and she won’t be the last. In her response to the firing and in subsequent tweets, Halper pointed to several other recent examples:

    • CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill for calling for a free Palestine “from the river to the sea” (FAIR.org, 12/11/18).
    • The Guardian’s firing of Nathan J. Robinson for satirically claiming on Twitter that Congress cannot authorize new spending without a portion of it going to Israel (FAIR.org, 2/22/21).
    • AP’s firing of Emily Wilder after she was targeted by a right-wing smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism as a college student (Democracy Now!, 5/25/21; FAIR.org, 5/22/21).
    • Journalist Abby Martin being banned from the University of Georgia for refusing to sign a pledge that she would not participate in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (Mint Press, 2/10/20). (Numerous academics, like Angela Davis and Norman Finkelstein, have also faced retaliation for their critical views of Israel.)
    Twitter: After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times...

    Photojournalist Hosam Salem (Twitter, 10/5/22) disclosed being banned by the New York Times for his pro-Palestinian views.

    Just this week, New York Times freelance photojournalist Hosam Salem reported that the Times fired him after the “Israel lobby organization Honest Reporting, which exists to attack the Palestinian narrative in the West” (Mondoweiss, 10/5/22), accused him of antisemitism for voicing support for Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation forces. Salem discussed his firing on Twitter:

    What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army.

    ‘The best defense is a good offense’

    The firing of journalists like Salem, Wilder and Hill wasn’t in response to their violating any clear policy of their respective outlets. Instead, well-funded pressure groups are able to get pro-Palestinian journalists fired, especially when they can appeal to pro-Israel sympathies in media management.

    In Halper’s case, her firing may be connected to Nexstar Media‘s August 2021 purchase of The Hill, including its TV outlet. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic (10/1/22) wrote of “signs of a possible tilt in The Hill’s editorial line on Israel”:

    In late August, Nexstar filled the position of deputy managing editor of NewsNation, its cable channel, with Jake Novak, a journalist who spent the preceding year and a half as the media director of the Israeli consulate general in New York….

    Six days before the announcement of his hiring, Novak led a presentation at Bar-Ilan University titled, “Defending Israel Against Media Bias—How to Fight News Media and Social Media Bias Against Israel: The Best Defense Is a Good Offense.” It was an update of a talk he had given in 2016 about defending Israel’s reputation, which the host described as “an absolute master class in public relations and diplomacy.”

    As Marcetic noted, a pro-Israel bias in Nexstar should be of grave concern: Following its purchase of Tribune Media, it is now the largest local broadcast TV owner in the US.

    Lethal censorship

    Graphic depicting the fact that Israeli occupation forces committed 479 violations and crimes against journalists in the first half of 2022.

    For journalists operating in Palestine, censorship takes on violent and deadly forms.

    Getting fired is hardly the worst form of retribution experienced by journalists who expose Israeli crimes. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reports 479 violations and crimes against Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces and settlers in just the first half of 2022. These include two killings, 35 shootings, and numerous assaults and arrests. On Wednesday, two Palestinian journalists were shot by Israeli occupying forces while covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank (Al Jazeera, 10/5/22). Over 50 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since 2001, including Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was an American citizen (Vox, 5/13/22; FAIR.org, 5/20/22, 7/2/22).

    Washington’s supply of weapons and aid to Israel is critical to Israel’s capacity to uphold apartheid (Al Jazeera, 6/4/21; Belfer Center, 2/7/17), so maintaining a positive opinion of Israel in the US public is of extreme importance to Israel. By censoring critical journalists like Katie Halper, US corporate media are thus playing a key role in supporting a system that has seen journalists killed, assaulted and detained in Israel/Palestine.

    ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the The Hill at https://thehill.com/contact/ or on Twitter: @HillTVLive. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post Katie Halper Violated Media Taboo Against Israel Criticism appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Should the Big Tech inquiry shine a light on censorship?

    One of the most interesting facets of the freedom of speech debate is the fact there is almost no argument as to whether a limit to this freedom should exist. It’s purely a matter of where the line sits and who draws it. One of the immutable cornerstones of our democracy is the belief in…

    The post Should the Big Tech inquiry shine a light on censorship? appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • New Zealand’s PM Wants More Online Censorship For The War In Ukraine

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern continued her crusade for the expansion of internet censorship during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, this time using the war in Ukraine.

    “Whether it’s climate, trade, health crises or seeking peaceful solutions to war and conflict, New Zealand has always been a believer in multilateral tools,” Ardern told the assembly, adding that “without reform, we risk irrelevancy.”

    “There is perhaps no greater example of this than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Ardern said. “Let us all be clear: Russia’s war is illegal. It is immoral. It is a direct attack on the UN charter, and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for. Putin’s suggestion that it could at any point deploy further weapons that it has at their disposal reveals the false narrative that they have based their invasion on. What country who claims to be a liberator, threatens to annihilate the very civilians they claim to liberate? This war is based on a lie.”

    Later in her speech, Ardern returns to the theme that Russia’s war is “based on a lie” to argue for the censorship of online speech which supports the idea that Russia is fighting for legitimate reasons in Ukraine.

    Using the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack as a segue to talk about the perils of online radicalization, Ardern then smoothly transitions to the subject of “mis- and disinformation” on the internet.

    “This will also be important in understanding more about mis- and disinformation online: a challenge that we must as leaders address,” Ardern said.

    “As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” Ardern added, an acknowledgement of the grave human rights concerns inherent in having ‘leaders’ participate in the regulation of public speech. “But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to this challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value.”

    Then it gets even creepier.

    “After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?” asks the prime minister. “How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology? The weapons may be different, but the goals of those who perpetuate them is often the same. To cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves. To disband communities. To collapse the collective strength of countries who work together. But we have an opportunity here to ensure that these particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare.”

    Ardern’s remarks are currently getting a lot of criticism in right-wing circles due largely to her suggestion that online discourse about climate change needs to be regulated so that the issue can be properly addressed. And to be sure that is an absolutely insane thing for her to say; I believe climate change is real and anthropogenic and I find the idea of silencing people who disagree with me about that unthinkably nightmarish. This is a line of thinking that can only arise from a profoundly tyrannical mind.

    But what isn’t getting enough attention at this time is the fact that Ardern is calling for an increase in the already outrageous amount of online censorship we are seeing with regard to the war in Ukraine. She explicitly said the war is “based on a lie”, and then went on to argue that people need to be stopped from circulating speech which lends credibility to that lie, even if such freakishly authoritarian measures may be “misinterpreted” as being hostile to free speech.

    Ardern argues that online speech claiming that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is legal and noble makes it harder to attain peace, but of course she doesn’t really believe that, and neither does anyone else. The idea that free speech about the war could somehow hamper peace negotiations between governments is self-evidently absurd and completely nonsensical.

    In reality, this war is just the latest in a string of excuses we’ve been given by the western political/media class to censor the internet, with earlier justifications including Covid-19, election security, domestic extremism, and Russian propaganda again after the 2016 US election. But asserting that it’s important to stop people from thinking wrong thoughts about a war is a major escalation from all those other justifications, because they’re no longer pretending that it’s being done for our own good. Our wrongthink is the justification, in and of itself.

    Which is a problem, because this is in fact an extremely dangerous proxy war being waged against Russia by the US and its imperial member states. It was absolutely deliberately provoked, it’s showing no sign of ending anytime soon, and its continual escalation threatens the life of everyone on this planet. The US has lied about every war it has ever been involved in, and if ever there was a war to bring scrutiny and skepticism to, it’s the one that is bringing us closer to a nuclear exchange than at any other time in history.

    This notion that it is the job of “leaders” to involve themselves in regulating the ideas and information we’re allowed to share with each other online needs to be stomped out, dissolved in acid, and flushed down the toilet. That’s not their place. They shouldn’t even be looking in that direction, much less talking amongst themselves at the United Nations about how best they can go about doing it. It’s a profoundly dangerous notion that needs to be rejected with unadulterated aggression.

    Free speech is not a “weapon of war”. It’s free speech. Either let us have it or stop pretending you value it.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Book-Banning Attempts in US Have Reached Unprecedented Level, Libraries Report

    Right-wing attempts to ban books are showing no sign of slowing down, according to a report released Friday by the American Library Association — and in fact have reached an unprecedented level, with libraries and bookstores increasingly facing legal threats over the materials on their shelves.

    The organization, which has been tracking book-banning efforts for more than 20 years, found that so far in 2022, parents and other community members have “challenged” 1,651 different books and have issued 681 complaints across the country.

    In 2021, 1,597 individual books were the subject of challenges, which can include written complaints, forms provided by and submitted to a library, or social media posts in which people demand books be removed from a library’s collection.

    Friday’s report showed that right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty have escalated their attacks on library patrons’ right to access certain books, with 27 police reports having been filed so far this year over accusations that librarians are providing inappropriate or “pornographic” material to children.

    “We’re truly fearful that at some point we will see a librarian arrested for providing constitutionally protected books on disfavored topics,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the Office of Intellectual Freedom at ALA, told The New York Times.

    Book challenges this year have mainly focused on titles that center Black or LGBTQ+ characters, according to the Times.

    The graphic novel Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about the author’s coming of age as a nonbinary person, has been the most frequently targeted book so far this year.

    The book was at the center of a vote in Jamestown Township, Michigan last month in which residents rejected essential funding for the town’s library, prompting concerns that the library will be forced to close within the next year.

    Parents in a town in Washington also filed police reports against the school district for including Gender Queer in a school library’s collection, and a Republican lawmaker sued Barnes & Noble to prohibit it from selling the book to minors — a lawsuit that was dismissed last month.

    ALA president Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada said the group’s report “reflects coordinated, national efforts to silence marginalized or historically underrepresented voices and deprive all of us—young people, in particular — of the chance to explore a world beyond the confines of personal experience.”

    Banning books that discuss racial inequality or LGBTQ+ issues “denies young people resources that can help them deal with the challenges that confront them,” added Pelayo-Lozada. “Efforts to censor entire categories of books reflecting certain voices and views shows that the moral panic isn’t about kids: It’s about politics.”