radiofree.asia

Category: Censorship

  • Indian government suspends MediaOne TV for unspecified ‘security reasons’

    New Delhi, January 31, 2022 – Indian authorities should allow the Malayalam-language news channel MediaOne TV to operate freely, and should not suspend broadcasters over their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

    At about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, MediaOne TV ceased broadcasting after it received a suspension notice via email, according to the outlet’s editor, Pramod Raman, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

    The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting suspended the broadcaster for unspecified “security reasons” and because it allegedly had not been granted a security clearance by the Home Ministry during its license renewal, according to multiple news reports, a statement by the outlet, and Raman.

    Following the suspension, the Kerala High Court temporarily postponed the government’s order until a hearing on Wednesday, according to those sources. The channel has since resumed live broadcasting.

    “Indian authorities should not use vague security concerns to suspend broadcasters like MediaOne TV,” said Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C.  “The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting must drop its bid to ban MediaOne TV and stop efforts to create such a harmful precedent.”

    MediaOne TV is owned by Madhyamam Broadcasting Limited, many of whose investors are members of the Kerala state chapter of the Islamic organization Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, according to the Indian Express. The channel has critically reported on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organization of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as the government’s response to protests surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act and farming legislation.

    On January 5, the outlet received a notice from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting asking why its security clearance should not be revoked, Raman said. He told CPJ that the notice did not cite any specific actions by the broadcaster that could result in the denial of its clearance.

    Previously, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting banned MediaOne TV for 48 hours over its coverage of riots in Delhi in March 2020, as CPJ documented at the time.

    CPJ emailed the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Home Ministry for comment, but did not immediately receive any replies.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Let’s Back Up A Sec And Ask Why Free Speech Actually Matters

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Joe Rogan/Spotify controversy is still going on and has only gotten more vitriolic and intense. Claims that Spotify must walk away from its $200 million contract with the world’s most popular podcaster for promoting vaccine misinformation have sparked a lot of debates about freedom of speech, online censorship, what exactly those terms mean, and whether they can be correctly applied to the practice of Silicon Valley deplatforming.

    When confronted with accusations of quashing free speech and promoting censorship, those who support online deplatforming in this or that situation will often respond with lines like “It’s not censorship, it’s just a private company enforcing its terms of service,” or “Nobody is obligated to give you a platform,” or “Freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach,” or by posting the famous XKCD comic which says “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think you’re an asshole, and they’re showing you the door.”

    And of course it’s true that nobody is legally guaranteed the right to speak on an independent online platform. But even if we ignore the fact that this censorship behavior is not being driven solely by the wishes of independent corporations and is in fact happening in increasingly close coordination with the US government whose officials openly threaten Silicon Valley platforms with repercussions if they don’t regulate speech, the fact that it is technically legal for those companies to silence voices they don’t like is not a sound argument. It doesn’t prove that censorship isn’t happening or that the deplatforming is okay, it just proves that it is technically legal for those giant monopolistic platforms to do those things. A casual glance at history shows that plenty of terrible things have been done which were perfectly legal at the time.

    To really answer the question of whether the increasingly widespread practice of Silicon Valley censorship via algorithm and deplatforming is a major problem and whether an increase in speech restriction is desirable, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves why free speech even matters in the first place. Why is it something that’s written into constitutions and upheld as sacrosanct in so many nations? Why is it a value we’re told has supreme importance all our lives?

    Any debate over online censorship will necessarily remain superficial until you can address this question at a fundamental level, because otherwise you’re just bleating noises at each other about “free speech” without being clear about what exactly you’re talking about and why it matters. This is why those debates tend to stagnate.

    The American Civil Liberties Union takes a solid stab at answering this question by offering “Three Reasons Why Freedom Of Expression Is Essential To A Free Society“. Firstly, that “The right to express one’s thoughts and to communicate freely with others affirms the dignity and worth of each and every member of society, and allows each individual to realize his or her full human potential.” Secondly, that free expression is “vital to the attainment and advancement of knowledge, and the search for the truth.” Third, that it is “necessary to our system of self-government and gives the American people a ‘checking function’ against government excess and corruption.”

    Virtually all debate about online censorship revolves solely around the first reason listed, which is essentially that people should have free speech because freedom is nice to have. This is unfortunate, because it’s easily the least compelling of the three. If your entire argument boils down to “I should be free to say whatever I want on this online platform because muh freedom,” it’s basically just you laying out a narrative about what you think you should get to do which holds no more inherent weight than anyone else’s narrative about what you should get to do. “You can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” gets stretched into “Your freedom to say whatever you want about vaccines on this social media platform is less important than the need to convince everyone to get vaccinated,” and the conversation stalls out there.

    That changes when we consider the ACLU’s second and third reasons why free expression is important. Suddenly we’re no longer talking about how Johnny Facebook would prefer to be allowed to post QAnon conspiracy theories because it makes him feel nice inside, we’re talking about the good of society as a whole. If the case is strong enough, then it really doesn’t matter if an app isn’t technically part of the government because it’s still a part of society, and arguments about the needs of the collective trumping the rights of the individual crumble because this is all about protecting the needs of the collective.

    So how strong is that case? Well, let’s take it apart and have a look.

    The argument is essentially the same in both the second and third reasons for free expression put forward by the ACLU: that allowing people to freely share ideas and information leads to positive change. In the case of the second it’s talking about positive change in society, and in the case of the third it’s about positive change in government. But in both the idea is essentially the same: the free flow of speech lets the collective sort out truth from falsehood and conduct itself accordingly.

    In short, free speech matters because it’s how the status quo gets changed. It’s how society collectively figures out that racism is undesirable, that women are equal to men, that science is superior to superstition, and that the world perhaps does not work the way we once thought it did. It’s also how society figures out that a government has become inundated with “excess and corruption,” that status quo systems aren’t working, and that new systems are required.

    Now here’s the kicker: if free speech matters because it’s what allows the collective to change the status quo, then it is exactly those voices who oppose the status quo whose speech must be adamantly protected. The speech of those who support the mainstream orthodoxies of the political/media class is vastly less important than those who dissent from those orthodoxies, because only the latter is pushing for change.

    What we have now is just the opposite: if you adhere to the mainstream orthodoxies of America’s Dempublican uniparty there is an approximately zero percent chance that you will ever be subjected to online censorship, but if you oppose any of those orthodoxies you will see yourself algorithmically de-boosted, suspended, and shoved further and further away from any position of possible influence.

    This is on top of the fact that all traditional media are already 100 percent locked down in support of the status quo. You will never see serious opponents of imperialism, militarism, capitalism and oligarchy elevated to positions of influence in the mainstream news media or in Hollywood; every single one of those positions are consistently occupied by people who have proven themselves to be at least politically mute if not virulently supportive of status quo politics.

    For this reason we can accurately say that free speech is already missing from our society in every way that counts, regardless of what our nation’s laws might say.

    Free speech matters because dissent from the status quo is how the status quo gets changed. If voices which oppose the status quo are consistently denied access to mainstream platforms and are aggressively suppressed online, they’re unable to change the status quo. They don’t have free speech in any meaningful sense, because they’re actively obstructed from using free speech to do what free speech is supposed to do: challenge existing consensus, norms, systems, and power structures.

    If the only way to get your voice into a position of influence is to support the status quo, then with regard to the actual reasons free speech matters it’s functionally the same as having no speech at all. It’s like saying “You have free speech; you can say anything you want into this hole in the ground!”

    It doesn’t matter what you’re free to say if nobody hears you say it. If those who support the status quo are loudly amplified on all media while those who oppose it are denied access to mainstream audiences and algorithmically censored, dissenting views have no effect. They might as well not exist. An environment where everyone has “free speech” but only those who support the status quo get heard is functionally indistinguishable from an environment where no one has free speech and only authorized state propaganda gets heard.

    Which is of course the idea. A tremendous amount of effort goes into keeping the public from awakening to and freeing themselves from the injustices of status quo systems while still giving them the illusion of freedom. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

    And some might argue “Sure, okay, allowing dissident voices to be heard is important, but that doesn’t need to include anti-vaxxers and QAnoners!” Or “doesn’t need to include Russian propagandists!” Or “doesn’t need to include CCP shills!” Or whatever your personal bias happens to be.

    But how would that work, exactly? How would it be decided who counts as a worthy dissident voice and who doesn’t? Who do we imagine would be making that call? Would we be leaving the question of who qualifies as a legitimate critic of the status quo to institutions who have a vested interest in that status quo, like billionaire megacorporations? Or plutocrat-owned mainstream media “fact-checkers”? Or the government? Or do you imagine that Silicon Valley executives will be shooting you a DM to get your personal okay on whether or not to censor someone?

    If you really think about this it quickly becomes apparent that there exists no institution that can be entrusted with the power to determine who is qualified to criticize the status quo, because they’re all inseparably intertwined with it. Even if you had an independent board of rank-and-file citizenry deciding when online censorship is appropriate, its members would all be subjected to the same status quo propaganda systems as everyone else in our society and thus still wildly biased toward the preferences of ruling power structures.

    Another problem is that nobody is qualified to serve as an official arbiter of absolute reality. What’s true today may be untrue tomorrow, as we’ve seen time and time again with the official lines about Covid-19 since the outbreak. It could turn out in the future that there are in fact problems with mRNA technology and that some of the concerns being voiced today were entirely well-founded. We simply do not know for certain, because we are not the omniscient demigods that our egos are often tempted to pretend we are.

    Protecting our ability to collectively course-correct is more important than preventing people from saying things that aren’t currently considered true. So important that it outweighs even the worst consequences of some people potentially making poor health decisions as a result.

    So it becomes clear that the only thing to do is let everyone speak, on the platforms that people have come to rely on for sharing ideas and information with the largest possible number of people. A great many of them will be wrong, and a great many of them will be stupid. But the alternative is shutting down the possibility of healthy change ever occurring in a status quo that is killing our ecosystem, pushing us toward confrontations between nuclear-armed nations, and becoming increasingly despotic.

    ____________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Pressure Campaign On Spotify To Remove Joe Rogan

    On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Young’s music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided with Rogan. All sorts of censorship-mad liberals celebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify’s refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtag urging the deletion of Spotify’s app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history’s largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.

    The post The Pressure Campaign On Spotify To Remove Joe Rogan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Shahd Abusalama’s suspension appears to be a malicious attack on free speech

    Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama, a PhD student and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), was suspended from her role following accusations of antisemitism. However, Abusalama completely rejects these accusations and says they’re “malicious and motivated in bad faith”.

    On 27 January, Abusalama said she’d been reinstated to her teaching – although she still hadn’t seen the allegations against her. She said:

    I am accused of antisemitism. Because I dare to speak up against power, and I dare to demand freedom, justice, and equality for my people

    She added that SHU announced an investigation without her knowledge. Moreover, she told The Canary she’s completely in the dark about the content and timeframe of this investigation.

    So even if her reinstatement is welcome news, it’s certainly not the last we’ll hear of this. Because Abusalama demands people take action against censorship of Palestinian voices and against the university’s handling of this matter.

    Censoring Palestinian “pro-justice” voices

    Abusalama told The Canary she first became aware just before the 2021 Christmas break that something like this might happen. She said someone at the Jewish News contacted her for a statement claiming SHU was about to investigate her tweets for antisemitic content. The outlet published an article on it on 24 December 2021.

    Then Abusalama said that in January:

    I was going to meet my students for a second time on Friday for my scheduled seminars… I received this sudden email from my university saying that I cannot resume teaching and that I’m under investigation following a complaint. Everything was vague. Nothing was mentioned of the nature of the complaint or why I was suspended. They also notified me that they would tell the students that my classes were cancelled until further notice.

    Her suspension was compared to that of University of Bristol professor David Miller who was fired from his position in 2021. The case against him was also based on allegations of antisemitism in response to his academic work linking Zionism to Islamophobia. Miller said he was speaking out against anti-Muslim racism in the UK. While Miller was cleared of “anti-Jewish bigotry”, the university didn’t reinstate him.

    Abusalama now wants people to write to the university to demand it drops its investigation. She also wants it to issue a public apology and ensure Palestinian justice activists are not subject to “malicious censorship” again:

    She additionally wants the university to drop its adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Because while this definition does apply to antisemitism and other forms of racism, it also conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

    Ignoring Israel’s crimes

    Her suspension comes at a time when Israel continues to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. This is a move which a spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for Human Rights had previously said was “prohibited under international humanitarian law and may amount to a war crime”. It also comes at a time when Palestinians hold “Global Days of Action for Palestine”. On these days of action, Palestinians intensified:

    protests against Israel’s dramatic escalation of violence and ethnic cleansing across Historic Palestine.

    Abusalama spoke to The Canary at a protest in Sheffield in May 2021. She called on the world to act as Israel besieged Gaza. Israel bombed Gaza from land, sea, and air and killed over 130 Palestinians on that occasion, the majority of whom were civilians. She told The Canary:

    Reporting from the ground what is happening, the repression of Israeli military and settler extremist groups is beyond description, and no one is safe in their homes. It is indiscriminate repression. …

    The inherent recent racist character of the supremacist ideology of Zionism, that that is basically dictating the policies and practices of dehumanisation against the Palestinians.

    We are counting one massacre after the other, one victim after the other. And it’s just non stop. And we don’t want more condemnation or declarations. We don’t want to hear calls for de-escalation. We want Israel to be held accountable. And it’s long overdue, that justice is served for the Palestinians. It is long overdue that Palestinian refugees like me, return to their home. It’s wrong; it’s morally disturbing that Jews anywhere in the world, in the US, can go and claim a right to return to Palestine when I, the indigenous people of Palestine, cannot return.

    They allegedly targeted her

    Abusalama believes Jewish News, which she described as “Zionist press”, protested her appointment as associate lecturer at the university and could have targeted her. She also said:

    that people who lead the campaign against antisemitism are also people who are chairs of the Jewish National Fund, who has been leading Zionist settler colonial expansion on our lands since early 20th century. And until now, they are contributing to the dispossession of the Palestinians in Jerusalem, in Hebron, in Beita… everywhere

    She believes her case is part of a coordinated attempt by Zionist organisations to take down pro-Palestinian academics. She provided examples of this to The Canary.

    These include an allegation that a criminal attorney in Vienna accused her of writing an antisemitic article in Al Jazeera. This was an attempt to damage her reputation and position at the University.

    Then in August 2019, David Collier published a report called The Labour Party, obsession and radicalisation. The report included a case study on Sheffield. In that report, he accused Abusalama of spreading “hard-core antisemitism”. She also claims the Jewish Chronicle smeared her because of her 2019 Boycott Eurovision Campaign. That was the year the competition took place in Israel.

    Additionally, she believes this campaign is part of a “historical pattern” where people prioritise the colonial narrative over the narrative of the colonised people. Moreover, she says the university has done nothing to protect her well-being, her rights, or her academic freedom. She says the university continues to:

    engage with the Zionist press, confirming to them that they have adopted the political tool of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, while continuing to be dismissive of their own students’ education, my story and my life

    The Canary contacted SHU for comment but received no response.

    Solidarity with Shahd Abusalama

    This is why, according to Abusalama, resistance against such attacks is crucial. There was an outpouring of support for Abusalama across social media and in public which she believes helped her in this struggle:

    Abusalama said she’s very grateful for the support she has received so far. She says it’s “keeping me grounded and what is keeping me carrying on”. The “overwhelming” support has come from students, others at the university, her trade union, and people all over the world.

    She also thanked “alternative press” for its support and for “shifting the narrative and [equalising] the gap in this power imbalance”. This latest alleged attempt by the Zionist lobby to silence criticism of Israel’s crimes is not going unanswered.

    Featured image via 5Pillars – YouTube Screengrab

    By Peadar O'Cearnaigh

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Speech Is Only Free If Dissenting Voices Get Heard: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    How many journalists are capable of doing what Julian Assange did to expose the criminality of the powerful? Not many. How many are both capable and willing? Fewer still. How many of those are now willing after seeing what’s being done to Assange? Even fewer. And that’s what his persecution is all about.

    ❖

    Americans: healthcare please

    US government: Sorry did you say send 100 tons of weaponry to Ukraine?

    Americans: no, healthcare

    US government: Alright, you drive a hard bargain, but here’s those 100 tons of weapons to Ukraine you asked for.

    ❖

    A Ukraine war is very easily avoidable and anyone suggesting otherwise is a lying shitstain who you should hate intensely and never forgive.

    ❖

    “Kids, a nuclear war has started and we’ll all be dead soon.”

    “Oh no! Why??”

    “I don’t really know. Something about NATO open doors and needing to confront Putin in eastern Ukraine? Couldn’t understand it but I trust that it was worth it.”

    ❖

    Our foreign policy establishment is writing checks that our ability to tolerate nuclear radiation can’t cash.

    ❖

    Free speech matters because dissent from the status quo is how the status quo gets changed. If voices which oppose the status quo are consistently denied access to mainstream platforms and are algorithmically suppressed online, they’re unable to change the status quo. They don’t have free speech in any meaningful sense, because they’re actively obstructed from using free speech to do what free speech is supposed to do: challenge existing consensus, norms, systems, and power structures.

    If the only way to get your voice into a position of influence is to support the status quo, then as far as the actual reasons free speech is considered an important right are concerned, it’s functionally the same as having no speech at all. It’s like saying “You have free speech; you can say anything you want into this hole in the ground!”

    It doesn’t matter what you’re free to say if nobody hears you say it. If those who support the status quo are loudly amplified on all media while those who oppose it are denied access to mainstream audiences and algorithmically censored, dissenting views have no effect. They might as well not exist. An environment where everyone has “free speech” but only those who support the status quo get heard is functionally indistinguishable from an environment where no one has free speech and only authorized state propaganda gets heard.

    Which is of course the idea. A tremendous amount of effort goes into keeping the public from awakening to and freeing themselves from the injustices of status quo systems while still giving them the illusion of freedom. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

    “Nobody’s obligated to give you a platform” is a nonsense argument if all platforms with any meaningful influence are depriving a voice to literally everyone who wants to significantly change the status quo. And they are.

    “Nobody’s obligated to give you a platform” is a nonsense argument if all platforms of any influence are heavily intertwined with and supportive of status quo power structures. And they are.

    “Nobody’s obligated to give you a platform. If you want to oppose the status quo you are free to oppose it quietly, on your own, where no one can hear you, while those who support the status quo are loudly amplified on new media and traditional media so everyone can hear them. This is what free liberal democracy looks like.”

    ❖

    Maybe get okay with the fact that literally any strategy for revolutionary change is going to look like a long shot. Because the system is just that entrenched and the public is just that propagandized. Ignore anyone who dismisses an idea for facilitating healthy change as a long shot. They’re all long shots.

    ____________________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Journalist Jonathan Cook has a new blog post out on his experience with being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years.

    “My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,” Cook writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. ‘Going viral’ is a distant memory.”

    “I won’t be banned,” he adds. “I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.”

    Cook says this began after the 2016 US election, which was when a major narrative push began for Silicon Valley corporations to eliminate “fake news” from their platforms and soon saw tech executives brought before the US Senate and told that they must “quell information rebellions” and come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord” online.

    Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed.

    By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on.

    “In case anyone wants to know how Facebook suppression works – I have 330,000 followers there but they’ve stopped showing my posts to many people,” Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp tweeted in January 2018. “I used to gain 6,000 followers a week. I now gain 500 and FB unsubscribes people without their knowledge – so my total number never increases.”

    I saw my own shares and view counts rapidly diminish in 2017 as well, and saw my new Facebook page follows suddenly slow to a virtual standstill. It wasn’t until I started using mailing lists and giving indie media outlets blanket permission to republish all my content that I was able to grow my audience at all.

    And Silicon Valley did eventually admit that it was in fact actively censoring voices who fall outside the mainstream consensus. In order to disprove the false right-wing narrative that Google only censors rightist voices, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted in 2020 to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of Google-owned YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative, which apparently even includes just marginally establishment-critical left-of-center voices like Kyle Kulinski. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

    People make a big deal any time a controversial famous person gets removed from a major social media platform, and rightly so; we cannot allow such brazen acts of censorship to become normalized. The goal is to normalize internet censorship on every front, and the powerful will push for that normalization to be expanded at every opportunity. Whether you dislike the controversial figure being deplatformed on a given day is entirely irrelevant; it’s not about them, it’s about expanding and normalizing internet censorship protocols on monopolistic government-tied speech platforms.

    But far, far more consequential than overt censorship of individuals is censorship by algorithm. No individual being silenced does as much real-world damage to free expression and free thought as the way ideas and information which aren’t authorized by the powerful are being actively hidden from public view, while material which serves the interests of the powerful is the first thing they see in their search results. It ensures that public consciousness remains chained to the establishment narrative matrix.

    It doesn’t matter that you have free speech if nobody ever hears you speak. Even in the most overtly totalitarian regimes on earth you can say whatever you want alone in a soundproof room.

    That’s the biggest loophole the so-called free democracies of the western world have found in their quest to regulate online speech. By allowing these monopolistic megacorporations to become the sources everyone goes to for information (and even actively helping them along that path as in for example Google’s research grants from the CIA and NSA), it’s possible to tweak algorithms in such a way that dissident information exists online, but nobody ever sees it.

    You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve tried to search YouTube for videos which don’t align with the official narratives of western governments and media lately. That search function used to work like magic; like it was reading your mind. Now it’s almost impossible to find the information you’re looking for unless you’re trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to think. It’s the same with Google searches and Facebook, and because those giant platforms dictate what information gets seen by the general public, that wild information bias toward establishment narratives bleeds into other common areas of interaction like Twitter as well.

    The idea is to let most people freely share dissident ideas and information about empire, war, capitalism, authoritarianism and propaganda, but to make it increasingly difficult for them to get their content seen and heard by people, and to make their going viral altogether impossible. To avoid the loud controversies and uncomfortable public scrutiny brought on by acts of overt censorship as much as possible while silently sweeping unauthorized speech behind the curtain. To make noncompliant voices “disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice,” as Cook put it.

    The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontations between nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality, oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we can begin organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And that’s never going to happen as long as information is locked down in the way that it is.

    Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. And as more and more people get their information about what’s happening in the world from online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.

    ____________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Don’t Underestimate How Badly The Powerful Need Control Of Online Speech

    Seems like almost every day now the mass media are blaring about the need for speech on the internet to be controlled or restricted in some way. Today they’re running stories about Joe Rogan and Covid misinformation; tomorrow it will be something else.

    The reasons for the need to control online speech change from day to day, but the demand for that control remains a constant. Some days it’s a need to protect the citizenry from online disinformation campaigns by foreign governments. Sometimes it’s the need to guarantee election security. Sometimes it’s the need to eliminate domestic extremism and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it’s Covid misinformation. The problems change, but the solution is always the same: increased regulation of speech by monopolistic online platforms in steadily increasing coordination with the US government.

    It’s actually pretty comical at this point, once you notice it. It’s like if you had an expensive Prada bag that your friend really coveted and she was always making up excuses to try and take it home with her. “Gosh I’m carrying all these small objects and I have nothing to carry them in!” “You’re going on vacation? I’ll look after your Prada bag for you!” “Oh no you slipped and now you’re clinging to a cliff’s edge! Quick! Throw me your Prada bag!” Once you know what they’re actually after, their attempts to obtain it look clownish and silly.

    Whenever I talk about how the immense power structure which the mass media serves and protects has a desperate need to control online speech, I’ll always get a few people objecting that the powerful don’t care about what ideas and information the ordinary riff raff share with each other on internet forums. They just do what they want regardless of public opinion, like Greek gods on Mount Olympus.

    And really nothing could be further from the truth. Controlling the thoughts we think about our nation and our world are of paramount importance to our rulers, because it’s only by controlling what we think that they can control how we vote, how we act, and whether or not we get fed up with being exploited and oppressed by a loose alliance of unelected plutocrats and government operatives. There is nothing, literally nothing, that these people would not do to maintain this control. Their very survival depends on it.

    Michael Parenti summed this up perfectly in his 2015 book “Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies” with this passage that was recently shared by Louis Allday:

    “But they don’t care about what we think. They turn a deaf ear to us,” some people complain. That is not true. They care very much about what you think. In fact, that is the only thing about you that holds their attention and concern. They don’t care if you go hungry, unemployed, sick, or homeless. But they do care when you are beginning to entertain resistant democratic thoughts. They get nervous when you discard your liberal complaints and adopt a radical analysis. They do care that you are catching on as to what the motives and functions of the national security state and the US global empire are all about at home and in so many corners of the world. They get furiously concerned when you and millions like you are rejecting the pap that is served up by corporate media and establishment leaders.

     

    By controlling our perceptions, they control our society; they control public opinion and public discourse. And they limit the range and impact of our political consciousness. The plutocrats know that their power comes from their ability to control our empowering responses. They know they can live at the apex of the social pyramid only as long as they can keep us in line at the pyramid’s base. Who pays for all their wars? We do. Who fights these wars? We do or our low-income loved ones do. If we refuse to be led around on a super-patriotic, fear-ridden leash and if we come to our own decisions and act upon them more and more as our ranks grow, then the ruling profiteers’ power shrinks and can even unwind and crash—as has happened with dynasties and monarchies of previous epochs.

     

    We need to strive in every way possible for the revolutionary unraveling, a revolution of organized consciousness striking at the empire’s heart with full force when democracy is in the streets and mobilized for the kind of irresistible upsurge that seems to come from nowhere yet is sometimes able to carry everything before it.

     

    There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic.

    Preventing their replacement with a system that is more responsive, just and democratic is precisely why our rulers are so keen on controlling the way we think, act and vote. They exert this control with their total domination of the mass media and mainstream education systems, with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and with the rapidly increasing normalization of internet censorship.

    The dawn of the internet sparked great hope for those who knew that the ruling power structures of our day retain supremacy by controlling and manipulating people’s access to and understanding of information; the possibility of billions of human minds freely spreading awareness of what’s going on in our world and sharing revolutionary ideas to address our problems spelled beautiful things for our future to anyone with a lucid understanding of the obstacles we face.

    Unfortunately, our rulers understood the significance of that moment too. They’ve been working tirelessly to ensure that the internet serves as a net positive for themselves and a net negative for the rest of us, manipulating the large-scale movements of information so that dissident voices are increasingly marginalized and inconsequential while giving themselves the ability to funnel propaganda into public minds far more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. If they succeed in their objectives, ordinary people will wind up no better at sharing unauthorized ideas and information than they were before the internet, while our rulers will be far more effective in controlling the way we think at mass scale.

    That they will succeed is by no means guaranteed. We are living in an entirely unprecedented moment in human history with many large-scale systems on the precipice of failure while technological advancement creates many other unpredictable factors; gaps could open up at any time to let light shine through in the massive movements that humanity is poised for. There is no way to accurately predict the future in a situation the likes of which we’ve never seen before, where patterns are crumbling and narrative is hitting white noise saturation point.

    Anything can happen. Win or lose, this is a hell of a time to be alive.

    ________________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Twitter Bans African Anti-Imperialists

    Since November 3 and 4, when the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) started the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia by attacking a federal army base, Western policymakers and their stenographic press, especially in the U.S., have defended the TPLF, their former puppet, and maligned the Ethiopian government and its prime minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali. In December, Twitter began banning Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Somali activists who had created and built a Pan-African #NoMore movement. I spoke to Nebiyu Asfaw, founder of the Ethiopian American Development Council, who had his account permanently banned.

    The post Twitter Bans African Anti-Imperialists appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Cancel Culture’s War on Free Speech

    Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.

    — George Carlin

    Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.

    Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

    In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

    “Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.

    This tendency to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” and demonize viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite is being embraced with a near-fanatical zealotry by a cult-like establishment that values conformity and group-think over individuality.

    For instance, are you skeptical about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines? Do you have concerns about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election? Do you subscribe to religious beliefs that shape your views on sexuality, marriage and gender? Do you, deliberately or inadvertently, engage in misgendering (identifying a person’s gender incorrectly) or deadnaming (using the wrong pronouns or birth name for a transgender person)?

    Say yes to any of those questions and then dare to voice those views in anything louder than a whisper and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms.

    This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

    In the past few years, for example, have been censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that were deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

    Most recently, Twitter suspended conservative podcaster Matt Walsh for violating its hate speech policy by sharing his views about transgendered individuals. “The greatest female Jeopardy champion of all time is a man. The top female college swimmer is a man. The first female four star admiral in the Public Health Service is a man. Men have dominated female high school track and the female MMA circuit. The patriarchy wins in the end,” Walsh tweeted on Dec. 30, 2021.

    J.K. Rowling, author of the popular Harry Potter series, has found herself denounced as transphobic and widely shunned for daring to criticize efforts by transgender activists to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender. Rowling’s essay explaining her views is a powerful, articulate, well-researched piece that not only stresses the importance of free speech and women’s rights while denouncing efforts by trans activists to demonize those who subscribe to “wrongthink,” but also recognizes that while the struggle over gender dysmorphia is real, concerns about safeguarding natal women and girls from abuse are also legitimate.

    Ironically enough, Rowling’s shunning included literal book burning. Yet as Ray Bradbury once warned, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

    Indeed, the First Amendment is going up in flames before our eyes, but those first sparks were lit long ago and have been fed by intolerance all along the political spectrum.

    Consider some of the kinds of speech being targeted for censorship or outright elimination.

    Offensive, politically incorrect and “unsafe” speech: Political correctness has resulted in the chilling of free speech and a growing hostility to those who exercise their rights to speak freely. Where this has become painfully evident is on college campuses, which have become hotbeds of student-led censorship, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and “red light” speech policies targeting anything that might cause someone to feel uncomfortable, unsafe or offended.

    Bullying, intimidating speech: Warning that “school bullies become tomorrow’s hate crimes defendants,” the Justice Department has led the way in urging schools to curtail bullying, going so far as to classify “teasing” as a form of “bullying,” and “rude” or “hurtful” “text messages” as “cyberbullying.”

    Hateful speech: Hate speech—speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation—is the primary candidate for online censorship. Corporate internet giants Google, Twitter and Facebook continue to re-define what kinds of speech will be permitted online and what will be deleted.

    Dangerous, anti-government speech: As part of its ongoing war on “extremism,” the government has partnered with the tech industry to counter online “propaganda” by terrorists hoping to recruit support or plan attacks. In this way, anyone who criticizes the government online can be considered an extremist and will have their content reported to government agencies for further investigation or deleted. In fact, the Justice Department is planning to form a new domestic terrorism unit to ferret out individuals “who seek to commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of domestic social or political goals.” What this will mean is more surveillance, more pre-crime programs, and more targeting of individuals whose speech may qualify as “dangerous.”

    The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.

    Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.

    The end result is mind control and a sleepwalking populace.

    In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

    In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.

    Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.

    The social shunning favored by activists and corporations borrows heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

    This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

    As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

    The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

    In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

    As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

    What this means is opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some.

    Understanding that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society, James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely.

    We haven’t done ourselves—or the nation—any favors by becoming so fearfully polite, careful to avoid offense, and largely unwilling to be labeled intolerant, hateful or closed-minded that we’ve eliminated words, phrases and symbols from public discourse.

    We have allowed our fears—fear for our safety, fear of each other, fear of being labeled racist or hateful or prejudiced, etc.—to trump our freedom of speech and muzzle us far more effectively than any government edict could.

    Ultimately the war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is: a war being waged by Americans against other Americans—is a war that is driven by fear.

    By bottling up dissent, we have created a pressure cooker of stifled misery and discontent that is now bubbling over and fomenting even more hate, distrust and paranoia among portions of the populace.

    By muzzling free speech, we are contributing to a growing underclass of Americans who are being told that they can’t take part in American public life unless they “fit in.”

    The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When there is no steam valve to release the pressure, frustration builds, anger grows, and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.

    Be warned: whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

    Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.

    At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

    When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.

    After all, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

    We are on a fast-moving trajectory.

    In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

    This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority marching in lockstep with technofascism.

    If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

    No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.

    We are almost at that point now.

    Free speech is no longer free.

    On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak.

    In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

    The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

    Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

    The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.

    The post Cancel Culture’s War on Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Undermining US Global Hegemony Is Good, Actually: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    China and Russia are right to try to undermine US unipolar hegemony. The planet is not America’s property and efforts to stop it being treated as such are good.

    It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still believe the US is a force for peace and justice in this world.

    ❖

    The belief that China is trying to become the next unipolar global hegemon is premised on the idea that Beijing has been watching the floundering US empire burn itself out and get crushed under its own weight after just a few decades and thinking “Oh that looks awesome! Let’s definitely do that!”

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, the US needs to keep bombing and starving civilians and engaging in nuclear brinkmanship and arming extremist militias and supporting dictators and destroying any nation who disobeys it. Otherwise the world might be taken over by a tyrannical regime!”

    ❖

    You could very easily fill a list with one thousand things Americans should care about more than the one year anniversary of a few wingnuts wandering around the Capitol Building for a bit and then leaving.

    ❖

    Americans have always had a special love for fake fighting. Civil War reenactments. Pro wrestling. Jerry Springer. Democrats vs Republicans.

    ❖

    Biden is a better Trump than Trump was; he’s advancing all Trump’s policies more effectively than Trump and actually doing things that Trump only talked about. If Trumpers had any actual ideological consistency instead of vapid partisan hackery they’d all be Biden supporters.

    ❖

    Please consider the possibility that it’s not a coincidence that Democrats have done literally exactly what those who oppose “vote blue no matter who” said they would do when they took power.

    ❖

    Nobody gets censored for “covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the so-called Facebook whistleblower, before that it was domestic extremism, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinfo and fake news. The reality is much simpler: people are being censored on the internet to normalize censorship on the internet.

    ❖

    Don’t underestimate how badly our rulers need to regulate speech on the internet. Their very survival depends on preventing awareness of the exploitative and oppressive nature of the status quo from spreading into the mainstream. They’d do literally anything to stop it.

    ❖

    Leaving mainstream social media platforms for fringe social media is just marginalizing yourselves. It’s doing the narrative managers’ job for them. By all means join alternative platforms also, but don’t quarantine yourself from the mainstream crowd as long as that’s where the people are. That’s just giving the bastards what they want.

    The whole objective of internet censorship via de-platforming and algorithm manipulation is to quarantine the mainstream herd away from wrongthink. Leaving is just doing exactly what they want you to do. You need to stay and disrupt establishment narratives where you can be seen.

    Sure you maybe have free speech on those small fringe platforms. You have free speech on a desert island, too. It doesn’t matter what you say if people don’t hear your words. If you oppose the status quo, you need to oppose it wherever your voice can influence people.

    ❖

     

     

     

    There is no “human nature” apart from our immutable physiological features. What we’re dealing with in matters of societal organization is the human condition; conditioning by propaganda, by early childhood trauma, by generational trauma. And we can heal all of that conditioning.

    People who cite “human nature” to argue that society must necessarily be organized a certain way are only ever talking about their own conditioning. If they think it’s human nature to be selfish and competitive, they’re just telling you how they’ve been conditioned to be.

    ❖

    The narratives about what’s going on in our world had already become unsustainably shrill and muddled before Covid; now it’s gotten so bad it affects the decisions people make in their everyday lives. Humanity is approaching a white noise saturation point with narrative itself.

    Which could end up being a good thing, in the long run. All of humanity’s problems ultimately boil down to an unwholesome relationship with mental narrative. If that relationship becomes so strained that it snaps, maybe we can replace it with something healthier and more truthful.

    _____________________

    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, 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. 

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    Image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

    Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

    In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

    We don’t talk enough about how completely insane it is that a social media company with billions of users is censoring worldwide political speech about a major historical figure in alignment with US government decrees. Even if you were to accept the ridiculous justifications for designating a branch of the Iranian military a terrorist organization, and even if you were to accept it as perfectly sane and normal for a communications company of unprecedented influence to take its marching orders on censorship from US government dictates, Soleimani is dead. He’s a dead man, he could not possibly pose any threat to anybody, and yet they’re censoring people from voicing opinions about his assassination.

    I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it absorb. This is a person who shaped the world, whose impact on human civilization will be studied for generations. And the largest social media company on earth is actively censoring discussion about him because the US government said it’s not allowed.

    Whenever I talk about the dangers of online censorship I always get a bunch of propagandized automatons bleating “It’s not censorship! Censorship is when the government restricts freedom of speech; this is just a private company enforcing its terms of service!”

    This line of argumentation is plainly born of sloppy analysis. All the largest online platforms have been working in conjunction with the US government to censor speech, and doing so with greater and greater degrees of intimacy. A monopolistic Silicon Valley megacorporation censoring political speech about an important historical figure because the US government says he was a terrorist is about as brazen an act of government censorship as you could possibly come up with. The fact that that censorship is outsourced to a putatively private company is irrelevant.

    The outsourcing of censorship to private corporations is just one more iteration of the way neoliberalism privatizes duties that would otherwise be done by the government. That’s all we’re seeing here. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is government censorship.

    The US government is the single most tyrannical and oppressive regime on this planet. It terrorizes entire populations and works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates, it has spent the 21st century slaughtering people by the millions to preserve its unipolar domination of the planet, it imprisons and tortures journalists for exposing its war crimes, and it aggressively censors political speech around the world.

    Every evil the US accuses other nations of perpetrating, it does on a far grander scale itself. It just does it under the pretence of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting terrorism, under cover of outsourcing and narrative management. It inflicts the most psychopathic acts of violence upon human beings around the world, but wraps it in a package of justice and righteousness. The US government is a blood-spattered serial killer wearing a plastic smiley face mask.

    ______________________

    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, 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. 

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    Feature image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Despotism Is the New Normal

    Despotism has become our new normal.

    Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

    These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

    This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

    The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

    Censorship. The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. Thus, while on paper, we are technically free to speak, in reality, we are only as free to speak as the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow. Yet it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

    The Emergency State. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. This is the power grab hiding in plain sight.

    Pre-crime. The government is about to rapidly expand its policing efforts to focus on pre-crime and thought crimes. Precrime aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. The intent is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism, a broad label that can be applied to anything or anyone the government perceives to be a threat to its power.

    The Surveillance State. This all-seeing fourth branch of government, comprised of a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors, watches everything we do, reads everything we write, listens to everything we say, and monitors everywhere we go. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

    Genetic privacy. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

    Bodily integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccines to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

    Gun control. After declaring more than a decade ago that citizens have a Second Amendment right to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense, the Supreme Court has now been tasked with deciding whether the Constitution also protects the right to carry a gun outside the home. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested>, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.

    Show Your Papers Society. By allowing government agents to establish a litmus test for individuals to be able to engage in commerce, movement and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the groundwork for a “show me your papers” society in which you are required to identify yourself at any time to any government worker who demands it for any reason.

    Singularity. The digital universe—the metaverse—is expected to be the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one. Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.

    Despotism. The gravest threat facing us as a nation may well be despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money. The American kakistocracy continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

    If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

    “We the people” are the hope for a better year.

    Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In such a scenario, no one wins.

    The post Despotism Is the New Normal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

    In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

    I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. 

    We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

    “We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

    Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

    The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

    It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

    When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

    I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

    This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

    __________________________

    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, 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. 

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  • Oklahoma Bill Would Empower Parents To Remove Books From School Libraries

    A bill proposed by a Republican state senator in Oklahoma would empower parents to have books that discuss gender identity removed from public school libraries—a measure that rights advocates warned could have life-threatening consequences for LGBTQ+ children across the state.

    Under Senate Bill 1142, introduced earlier this month by state Sen. Rob Standridge, just one parent would have to object to a book that includes discussion of “sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity” and other related themes in order to begin the process of removal.

    The post Oklahoma Bill Would Empower Parents To Remove Books From School Libraries appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures Which Affect Everyone

    Twitter has banned the account of controversial virologist Dr Robert Malone, who reportedly had half a million followers at the time of his removal. Malone is credited even by mainstream critics as having played a significant role in the development of the mRNA technology being used for Covid-19 vaccines today, but has recently come under fire for comments about the safety of those vaccines’ use on children which the Authorized Fact Checkers have labeled “dangerously and flagrantly incorrect.”

    Everyone should oppose the removal of Malone and commentators who share his views, regardless of whether they agree with them or vehemently despise them. The reason for this is very simple: only a fool would support government-tied monopolistic billionaire corporations regulating public discourse about Covid responses which affect us all. This is true regardless of what you personally happen to believe about mRNA vaccines.

    Arguments that Malone and his ilk are peddling “misinformation” have no bearing on the question of whether they should be removed from the platforms everyone uses to debate ideas and discuss information. It is entirely legitimate to make arguments that their claims are inaccurate, but it is not at all legitimate to claim that platforms which large sectors of humanity have come to rely on for public discourse should interfere with or obstruct those conversations.

    Even if we were to accept unconditionally the position that people should be banned from such platforms if they are posting “misinformation”, who exactly do we imagine would be determining whether something is misinformation or not? Will we be consulting some impartial, agendaless, omniscient demigod through some sort of crystal ball or magical rune portal? Or would we in fact be relying on flawed human beings looking at the information through the lens of their own cognitive biases, agendas, perceptual distortions and knowledge limitations?

    I ask because historically what these giant Silicon Valley corporations have been doing to determine who gets to have a voice and who doesn’t is working in consultation with think tanks funded by governments and the military-industrial complex like the Atlantic Council and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, as well as working with the US government directly to an increasingly intimate degree. This fact is devastating to the popular argument that these are merely private corporations enforcing their Terms of Service, since they are becoming inseparably interwoven with government power. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship.

    Public discourse is consolidated on these gigantic platforms to such an extent that getting your ideas heard by a large number of people requires participation in them, and now they are determining how issues of such immense political importance as government pandemic responses may be discussed, and doing so in increasingly intimate collaboration with the most powerful governments on earth.

    These restrictions on public discourse about the way human civilization responds to Covid-19 were first normalized in 2020 by the deplatforming of weirdos like David Icke for conspiracy theories linking coronavirus symptoms to 5G, and that normalization has continued to metastasize so far over the last year and a half that it’s now considered perfectly acceptable for these platforms to ban a popular scientific researcher whose work helped develop mRNA vaccines for expressing his scientific opinion about them.

    Humanity is a mess. We’re dealing with so many deep, deep problems and facing so many existential hurdles in our immediate future, and it’s clear that the people in charge aren’t going to navigate us through them with any degree of skill. This means we’re going to have to figure things out as a collective, and we’re not going to be able to do that if we’re forbidden from communicating with each other in ways the powerful don’t approve.

    Certainly allowing human speech to flourish unrestricted would mean a lot of people saying things that we disagree with, and even saying things that are objectively and demonstrably wrong. But the alternative is allowing speech to be controlled by the same power structure which saw fit to invade Iraq, which is currently committing genocide in Yemen and pushing us toward direct military confrontation with Russia and China. Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse.

    The future of humanity depends on our ability to bring light to the darkness, to bring awareness to that which we are not aware. As with individual awakening, a collective awakening will necessarily be sloppy, clumsy, and full of confrontation and awkward conversations. But it’s the only way we can begin working our way toward becoming a species whose actions are based on truth rather than untruth, on consciousness rather than unconsciousness. Until that happens, we will necessarily continue along our self-destructive trajectory.

    ________________________________

    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, 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. 

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Russian court orders closure of country’s oldest human rights group

    Supreme court ruling on Memorial is watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought

    Russia’s supreme court has ordered the closure of Memorial International, the country’s oldest human rights group, in a watershed moment in Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on independent thought.

    The court ruled Memorial must be closed under Russia’s controversial “foreign agent” legislation, which has targeted dozens of NGOs and media outlets seen as critical of the government.

    Continue reading…

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

  • The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge

    It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded Wikileaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.

    His treatment is a crime similar to those Wikileaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials – documents we were never supposed to see – detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    These two western countries killed non-combatants and carried out torture not, as they claimed, in the pursuit of self-defence or in the promotion of democracy, but to impose control over a strategic, resource-rich region.

    It is the ultimate, ugly paradox that Assange’s legal and physical fate rests in the hands of two states that have the most to lose by allowing him to regain his freedom and publish more of the truths they want to keep concealed. By redefining his journalism as “espionage” – the basis for the US extradition claim – they are determined to keep the genie stuffed in the bottle.

    Eyes off the ball

    Last week, in overturning a lower court decision that should have allowed Assange to walk free, the English High Court consented to effectively keep Assange locked up indefinitely.  He is a remand prisoner – found guilty of no crime – and yet he will continue rotting in solitary confinement for the foreseeable future, barely seeing daylight or other human beings, in Belmarsh high-security prison alongside Britain’s most dangerous criminals.

    The High Court decision forces our eyes off the ball once again. Assange and his supposed “crime” of seeking transparency and accountability has become the story rather than the crimes he exposed that were carried out by the US to lay waste to whole regions and devastate the lives of millions.

    The goal is to stop the public conducting the debate Assange wanted to initiate through his journalism: about western state crimes. Instead the public is being deflected into a debate his persecutors want: whether Assange can ever safely be allowed out of his cell.

    Assange’s lawyers are being diverted from the real issues too. They will now be tied up for years fighting endless rearguard actions, caught up in the search for legal technicalities, battling to win a hearing in any court they can, to prevent his extradition to the United States to stand trial.

    The process itself has taken over. And while the legal minutiae are endlessly raked over, the substance of the case – that it is US and British officials who ought to be held responsible for committing war crimes – will be glossed over.

    Permanently silenced

    But it is worse than the legal injustice of Assange’s case. There may be no hack-saws needed this time, but this is as visceral a crime against journalism as the dismemberment of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials back in 2018.

    And the outcome for Assange is only slightly less preordained than it was for Khashoggi when he entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul. The goal for US officials has always been about permanently disappearing Assange. They are indifferent about how that is achieved.

    If the legal avenue is a success, he will eventually head to the US where he can be locked away for up to 175 years in severe solitary confinement in a super-max jail – that is, till long past his death from natural causes. But there is every chance he will not survive that long. Last January, a British judge rejected extraditing Julian Assange to the US over his “suicide risk“, and medical experts have warned that it will be only a matter of time before he succeeds.

    That was why the district court blocked extradition – on humanitarian grounds. Those grounds were overturned by the High Court last week only because the US offered “assurances” that measures would be in place to ensure Assange did not commit suicide. But Assange’s lawyers pointed out: those assurances “were not enough to address concerns about his fragile mental health and high risk of suicide”. These concerns should have been apparent to the High Court justices.

    Further, dozens of former officials in the Central Intelligence Agency and the previous US administration have confirmed that the agency planned to execute Assange in an extrajudicial operation in 2017. That was shortly before the US was forced by circumstance to switch to the current, formal extradition route. The arguments now made for his welfare by the same officials and institutions that came close to killing him should never have been accepted as made in good faith.

    In fact, there is no need to speculate about the Americans’ bad faith. It is only too apparent in the myriad get-out clauses in the “assurances” they provided. Those assurances can be dropped, for example, if US officials decide Assange is not being cooperative. The promises can and will be disregarded the moment they become an encumbrance on Washington’s ability to keep Assange permanently silenced.

    ‘Trapped in a cage’

    But if losing the extradition battle is high stakes, so is the legal process itself. That could finish Assange off long before a decision is reached, as his fiancee Stella Moris indicated at the weekend. She confirmed that Assange suffered a small stroke during a hearing in October in the endless extradition proceedings. There are indications he suffered neurological damage, and is now on anti-stroke medication to try to stop a recurrence.

    Assange and his friends believe the stroke was brought on by the constant double strain of his solitary confinement in Belmarsh and a legal process being conducted over his head, in which he is barely allowed to participate.

    Nils Melzer, the United Nations expert on torture, has repeatedly warned that Assange has been subjected to prolonged psychological torture in the nine years since he fled into Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking asylum from US efforts to persecute him.

    That form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, was refined by the Nazis because it was found to be far more effective at breaking people than physical torture. Moris told the Daily Mail: “[The stroke] compounds our fears about [Assange’s] ability to survive the longer this long legal battle goes on. … Look at animals trapped in cages in a zoo. It cuts their life short. That’s what’s happening to Julian.”

    And that indeed looks to be the prize for US officials that wanted him assassinated anyway. Whatever happens to Assange, the lawless US security state wins: it either gets him behind bars forever, or it kills him quietly and quite lawfully, while everyone is distracted, arguing about who Assange is rather what he exposed.

    Political prisoner

    In fact, with each twist and turn of the proceedings against Assange we move further from the realities at the heart of the case towards narrative distractions.

    Who remembers now the first extradition hearings, nearly two years ago, at which the court was reminded that the very treaty signed by Britain and the US that is the basis for Assange’s extradition explicitly excludes political cases of the kind being pursued by the US against Assange?

    It is a victory for state criminality that the discussion has devolved to Assange’s mental health rather than a substantive discussion of the treaty’s misapplication to serve political ends.

    And similarly the focus on US assurances regarding Assange’s wellbeing is intended to obscure the fact that a journalist’s work is being criminalised as “espionage” for the first time under a hurriedly drafted, draconian and discredited piece of First World War legislation, the 1917 Espionage Act. Because Assange is a political prisoner suffering political persecution, legal arguments are apparently powerless to save him. It is only a political campaign that can keep underscoring the sham nature of the charges he faces.

    The lies of power

    What Assange bequeathed us through Wikileaks was a harsh light capable of cutting through the lies of power and power of lies. He showed that western governments claiming the moral high ground were actually committing crimes in our name out of sight in far-off lands. He tore the mask off their hypocrisy.

    He showed that the many millions who took to the streets in cities around the world in 2003 because they knew the US and UK would commit war crimes in Iraq were right to march. But he also confirmed something worse: that their opposition to the war was treated with utter contempt.

    The US and UK did not operate more carefully, they were not more respectful of human rights, they did not tread more lightly in Iraq because of those marches, because of the criticism beforehand. The western war machine carried on regardless, crushing the lives of anyone who got caught up in its maw.

    Now with Assange locked up and silenced, western foreign policy can return comfortably to the era of zero accountability that existed before Assange shook up the whole system with his revelations. No journalist will dare to repeat what Assange did – not unless they are ready to spend the rest of their days behind bars.

    The message his abuse sends to others could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too.

    The truth is journalism is already reeling from the combined assaults against Khashoggi and Assange. But the hounding of Assange strikes the bigger blow. It leaves honest journalism with no refuge, no sanctuary anywhere in the world.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post The hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How The OPCW’s Syria Probe Censored Science

    Senior OPCW officials doctored the original report; erased the conclusions of expert toxicologists who ruled out chlorine gas as the cause of death; and thwarted the key investigate area of forensic pathology, which could have helped determine how the dozens of civilian victims in Douma lost their lives.  Instead of explaining the extensive suppression, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias has avoided questions; offered false excuses; and smeared the veteran scientists who challenged the cover-up from within.

    Guest: Dr. Piers Robinson. Co-Director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, and convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. Working with the Berlin Group 21, led by veteran diplomats Hans von Sponeck and Jose Bustani to seek accountability for the OPCW cover-up.

    The post How The OPCW’s Syria Probe Censored Science appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • #NoMore Censorship of Africa’s Roving Digital Army of Peace

    At approximately 5 am PST on November 29th, I awoke to an almost uninterrupted buzz of text messages from my cell phone. I turned to my nightstand, put my glasses on and quickly learned through concerned friends that my Twitter account had been taken down. Naturally, I logged on to Twitter. From one account to the next, including my “burners”, I received an error message indicating that each account had been suspended. I was given no explanation. How could Twitter take down all my accounts without any explanation? What did I do to deserve such an honor? It didn’t take long for me to discover that I wasn’t alone. Apparently, Twitter had suspended about a dozen other accounts from the Horn of Africa and its diaspora that had been associated with the nascent #NoMore movement.

    The post #NoMore Censorship of Africa’s Roving Digital Army of Peace appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The US Manufactures Weapons And Consent: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The only manufacturing jobs left in the US are military weapons and consent.

    ❖

    Gotta keep dropping bombs because they gotta keep making bombs. Gotta keep making bombs because they made the entire economy dependent on bomb-making. This is the only type of system that could possibly work.

    ❖

    The goal of internet censorship is to suppress and marginalize unauthorized ideas so much that the internet actually becomes a net negative for ordinary people, because the only ones who will be able to rapidly share ideas of consequence will be the propagandists and their acolytes.

    ❖

    Because people who object to US-led imperialist aggressions against their governments are routinely purged from social media, those of us who do not live in nations that are being targeted by those aggressions have a special duty to forcefully speak out against US imperialism.

    ❖

    “Come to our Summit for Democracy,” said the nation whose elections are completely fake and whose intelligence agencies have interfered in scores of foreign elections and which openly works to topple democratically elected governments around the world all the time.

    I mean, come on:

    ❖

    Capitalism is such a garbage system that news media will shriek all day about “crime” like it’s this mysterious alien phenomenon being inflicted upon society from the outside instead of a very obvious symptom of economic injustices with very obvious and widely known solutions.

     

    ❖

    I was fully expecting Biden to be absolute shit but I will still admit to being disappointed that he just flat-out lied about ending the war in Yemen. Yes I know it serves me right for getting my hopes up. But it is still horrific that this atrocity continues.

     

    ❖

    “You’re Australian, don’t write about America.”

    You’re a literal empire. Everyone gets to talk about you. Shut the fuck up.

    When people would tell me to shut up about the US because I’m not American I used to point out that my co-writer/husband Tim is American, but I quickly realized that’s giving way to much credence to the idea that non-Americans can’t criticize a planet-dominating unipolar empire.

    ❖

    Covid is interesting in that it has a propaganda campaign that everyone’s aware of and encouraged to participate in. So you’ll see things like when Jimmy Dore got slammed earlier this year for talking about his adverse vaccine reaction, not because it was false, but because it hurt the propaganda effort.

    There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that Dore lied about having adverse reactions, but he got raked over the coals anyway. You see things like that all the time: people forcefully discouraged from talking about raw facts because it might hurt the vaccine effort or whatever.

    You are free to believe this propaganda campaign is a good thing, or that it’s a necessary evil, but what you can’t do is deny that it’s a propaganda campaign. There’s a concerted effort to manage perception, and the rank-and-file public is actively participating in that effort.

    None of this is to deny that there’s misinformation about Covid and vaccines etc; there’s an incredible amount of stupid bullshit and sloppy thinking out there. But there’s also a fair bit of real information that people simply cannot discuss outside certain echo chambers without being stomped down.

    This is a fairly new development, where the public is encouraged not just to share a certain message but to aggressively shut down anything which doesn’t perfectly align with it regardless of whether or not it is based in fact. Narrative managers are watching this one closely.

     

    ❖

    The increasing likelihood of nuclear war between the US power alliance and Russia and/or China is the most important issue in the world. It’s self-evidently priority number one, because there will be no politics, protests, Covid vaccines, racial issues, healthcare etc if we are all dead.

    There is no other issue that could instantly turn all the other issues into a non-issue tomorrow. Opposing the way the US and its allies are rapidly ramping up hostilities against Russia and China simultaneously and shutting down any possibility of detente must be our foremost priority.

    I just keep seeing a day not far in the future were a nuke gets discharged amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions between nuclear-armed nations and all we’ll be thinking about as the world ends is all the stupid nonsense we’d been arguing about previously.

    ❖

    The advent of nuclear weapons didn’t prevent a third world war, it just postponed it. It is not a coincidence that the two most powerful nations the US has been unable to absorb into its field of control are nuclear-armed ones. But now a final confrontation is on the horizon.

    After the second world war the US became the top imperialist aggressor, and since it couldn’t take out Russia and China it set about absorbing weaker nations into its imperial folds. Now only a few nations remain unabsorbed, and the drums of war against Russia and China are beating ever louder. There was a tiny four-year window after Hiroshima before Stalin got the bomb, and China followed five years later. By doing so they were able to postpone a direct confrontation with the US empire for the rest of the century, but they’ve been marked for absorption ever since.

    And now the campaign to shore up total global control is approaching its final stage.

    ❖

    Things are fucked, the people who are making them fucked will keep doing so until stopped by the public, and the public is being psychologically manipulated away from stopping them by propaganda. That’s our whole struggle right now, and it’s happening on many different fronts.

    __________________________

    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, 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. 

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    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • ‘How dictatorship works’: Hungarian academic quits in censorship row

    Andrea Pető was asked to withdraw criticism that a Europe-wide standards group had failed to confront illiberalism in Hungary and Poland

    A prominent academic has resigned from a Hungarian higher education body, alleging censorship and accusing the top European standards organisation of turning a blind eye to waning academic freedom in central Europe.

    Andrea Pető, a professor at the Central European University in Vienna, said she had resigned from the Hungarian Accreditation Committee’s humanities subcommittee last week after she was asked to change part of an article she wrote that was due to be published in an academic journal.

    Continue reading…

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

  • “Terror” Designation Of Rights Organizations Should Not Deter US-Based Activism

    It was a move quite aptly characterized as “authoritarian and repressive” by Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed El-Kurd in The Nation. On 19 October, the Israeli settler-colonial state designated six Palestinian human rights groups as “terror organizations.” At the time, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz claimed that Addameer, Al-Haq, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees are tied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP.)

    The post “Terror” Designation Of Rights Organizations Should Not Deter US-Based Activism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • No thanks, Thanksgiving . . . National Day of Sorrow . . . Mourning

    Yep, a broken record, or to update that, another one of a million cries in the dark digital dungeon to relearn history, and unlearn the rotten past. I have been looking at the Reclaiming the Sacred since I met Winona LaDuke decades ago. That’s a whole other story.

    But it doesn’t matter, especially in a time of Branch Covidians and the Trump-Biden-Obama-Clinton-Bush-Carter-Nixon-Ford-LBJ Days of Wine and Roses. Full of military industrial complex disease, and forget about American Indian Movement or Joan Baez or Leonard Peltier or even that guy, Marlon Brando.

    Forget about the PhDs and MDs and leaders and elders alive today from the many diverse tribes of Turtle Island.

    Retail, and weepy, “Oh, cherish the time, the Thanksgiving, with family, oh cherish these holiday days with family gathered around the consumer kitchen and the fine eye for a deal tables. A day of pulling out all the paper and digital flyers to see where old Saint Nick will be going FRIDAY.”

    Even lowly Time Magazine, tries to grapple with something tied to the 1863 start of Thanksgiving: “What Thanksgiving Means Today to the Native American Tribe That Fed the Pilgrims.”

    I personally think that it’s just another reminder of all the horrible things that this nation has done to not only us, but all native people,” the Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, 29 year-old Brian Weeden tells TIME of that “first” Thanksgiving, adding that he and his tribe feel largely forgotten. Courtesy of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe.

    That is 2021, November, in Time Magazine, the lede, as they say. We’ll see what the Matt Taibbi sorts, or Carlson types, or Trump lovers, or even all those on the Blue side of racism have to say, do, and how to act on Thanksgiving. Because, alas, as the Catholic Church is begrudgingly paying out for abuse in places like France, the rest of the white organized criminal-religious enterprises will be wringing their hands, but not righting the wrongs. Disappeared Indigenous here, everywhere. That Church, in Canada, and those graves. What a tip to the genocide iceberg.

    Note what Brian Weeden says in the next citation:

    For this nation to right a lot of their wrongs, they’re gonna have to own up to their racism, which they don’t want to do.

    Oh, the theater is set — presidential pardon for a Tom Turkey, and the homilies by Biden and Jill, the perennial kindergarten teacher who is a college faculty member (so many of them, democrats, and white women like Jill Biden are in the end, wannabe Special Ed teachers, but in the classrooms of college students!). Yeah, Kyle Rittenhouse is with Donald LLC Trump, not putting on the Black Face this time, but in the skin of their old favorite team, The Washington Redskins. White psychopath kid is being wined and dined by white psychopath geriatric. The irony, well, there is none. Kyle will get a cherished Washington pro team war bonnet. Manufactured and assembled in, well, of course, China.

    See the source image

    The optics are amazing, and right on line for 2024, for sure. This kid (above) has a job in the Trump LLC Republican Party juggernaut. To-Be-Sure!! And, they are having a great good white ugly boy-man time. Imagine the potential for an SUV, with Trump 2024 stickers on the bumpers and Stars and Bars noose flags on the double antennae, going for a group of protestors like these:

    See the source image

    Yet, we still have those Nazi types, pulling from their book of sayings — this in response to my op-ed in the local conservative rag acknowledging National Native American Heritage Month — at DV, “Another Genocide Month: Plying the Ignorance of K12, USA Lower/Higher Ed.” I’ll quote this Lincoln County fellow, here:

    “By all means, let’s teach history in its fullness of truth, as we ourselves learn and free ourselves from bias. The basic fact is, Stone Age tribes were crushed by more advanced and more powerful tribes, and we’re all still dealing with the outcome of the shattering of those societies.

    The fact is, genocide was sporadic and not generally practiced or effective. Displacement and an often cruel paternalism was the rule. The pre-Columbus Americas were not a rustic paradise.

    These were societies with their own particular pluses and minuses. When we teach the revised histories now, may it be said that among Northwest tribes, at potlatch gatherings, a rich chief might kill one or two slaves, just to demonstrate his immense wealth? (Something like the modern cliché of a rich businessman lighting his cigar with a $50 bill.) May we say that in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, villages raided other villages, killing and sometimes cannibalizing their victims? That the Aztec gods demanded bloody sacrifice of thousands of captives each year, and that the victims were cannibalized? That scalping existed in southwest and eastern North America before the entry of white settlers?”

    That is the old canard, the old Mel Gibson fun in his Maya-land Holly-Dirt lies. Oh, just teach the youth ALL of each and every detail, no? Thank goodness we have this response to my article in the Newport News Times:

    I appreciated Paul Haeder’s commentary (“Native American Heritage Month”) in the News-Times’ Nov. 12 “Viewpoint” on the Opinion page. I agree, our education system has not provided a very accurate view of Native American history in this country. In the early ’70s, I read Vine Deloria’s Custer Died For Your Sins. This book gave me a new historical perspective of Native American history, written by a Native American.

    The Oregon public school system would benefit from exposing its teachers to the history of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon. It is available in the book The People Are Dancing Again, by Charles Wilkinson. I suggest that reading parts of this history should be required reading for Oregon high school students. As Oregonians, we should have at least a basic understanding of the history of what the Native Americans experienced when westward expansion crossed the Cascade Mountains.

    As a resident of Lincoln County, I often read of how the Siletz Tribe gives back to this community, donating hundreds of thousand of dollars to coastal social programs. The Siletz and other tribes are writing their own history. They are alive and well, going forward, and we should celebrate that.

    The writer is referencing the staid short piece I did for the News Times — “Native American Heritage Month.” This is the caliber of the responses on both sides of the historical line. Talking about the sacred sites is important, and recovering the sacred, is the only way to bring these sites into the mindset of youth after youth. Vine:

    Standing on Sacred Ground: The four-part film.

    A Lakota Sioux, Vine Deloria, Jr. is one of the most outspoken figures in Native American affairs. His works promote Native American cultural nationalism and a greater understanding of Native American history and philosophy. In his work, Deloria fights prejudice against American Indians while addressing current issues, such as political and treaty rights. He is also concerned with the struggle between a religious view of life and the secularization that science and industry promote. He warns that people need to re-evaluate their stance to planet earth or humans may be one of the few species that has permanently ruined their habitat.

    “In a time of global turmoil, our planet needs the wisdom of people who remain one with their land. The Sacred Land Film Project gives voice to guardians of sacred sites around the world, offering hope for a new path forward.”

        —Peter Matthiessen

    He talks about how the Indian names are tied to bears — bears all over the plains, mountains, valleys. Bears are part of healing and prophecy. So are buffalo. Listen to him in the latter part of the talk above.

    So, this Biden, yaks about “I stand with Mashpee” during his failed campaign for his failed presidency in 2020. It’s all political theater, which is a nice term for bold faced lies, and there are plenty of lies tied to Native Americans, at contact, and during those crazy fictional writings called Thanksgiving.

    This May 16, Weeden became the youngest person elected chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag, a tribe of 2,600 enrolled citizens. This tribal center is in Mashpee, Massachusetts. He and his tribe believe the biggest issue any tribe faces today— is land, holding onto it, getting it back.

    I think that a lot of politicians say whatever they want to say to get elected. When they get there, it’s a whole different story. I was [part of the] White House Tribal Nations summit, and there really weren’t a lot of opportunities for leadership to address the administration. To add insult to injury, he’s going to be in Wampanoag territory on [Thanksgiving]—the supposed holiday that we don’t celebrate.

    Oh Biden, part of that Inquisition:

    President Joe Biden said Pope Francis told him he should 'keep receiving communion' - masslive.com

    Or, some days, he’s Jewish:

    Biden condemns Israel over homes plan | Israel | The Guardian

    Or, is he that Redskin guy?

    On Monday night, CNN aired Fight for the White House: Joe Biden’s Long Journey, a special program on the Democratic nominee’s career that included a popular photograph of Biden and one of his sons at what looks like a sports stadium (it’s not clear whether the son pictured is Hunter or Beau, who died in 2015). In the original photograph, which Biden himself posted on social media earlier this year, the kid pictured is wearing a maroon hat with the logo of the Washington football team which, until recently, used the Native American slur “Redskins” for its name. In the image that CNN includes in its documentary, the team logo has been entirely removed.

    Photograph via Joe Biden on Facebook.
    Screenshot via CNN.

    That is it in a nutshell, no? America whitewashing everything, even their own white washing.

    Here, ending with the Time Magazine article:

    Time: What’s the biggest issue the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe is currently facing?

    29 year-old Brian Weeden: The biggest issues facing the Mashpee tribe right now are with our land, the health and general welfare of our tribal citizens, and climate change and environmental impacts. We were fine living off the land; we were smart people to the point where we knew how to navigate this world. Had people listened to us, I don’t think we’d be in the situation that we are in with global warming and everything else. But I think the biggest [singular] struggle right now for our tribe is our struggle with the federal government, which has been a battle for over 400 years.

    The post No thanks, Thanksgiving . . . National Day of Sorrow . . . Mourning first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • CPJ demands Facebook restore ‘censored’ press freedom awards video

    The Committee to Protect Journalists press freedom 2021 video removed by Facebook, but still available on YouTube and Twitter. Video: CPJ (Hongkong crackdown at 32m:05s)

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on Facebook to restore a video honouring the winners of the International Press Freedom Awards (IPFA) at CPJ’s annual awards ceremony held on November 18 and streamed on social media during the event.

    Less than an hour after the stream ended, Facebook notified CPJ that the video had been withheld worldwide because of a “copyright match” to a 13-second clip owned by i-Cable News, a Hong Kong-based Cantonese-language cable news channel, reports CPJ.

    CPJ emailed i-Cable Communications Limited on November 24 requesting details but received no immediate reply.

    The clip, featuring Jimmy Lai taking a bite from an apple, was taken from an advertisement for the now-shuttered Apple Daily dating from the 1990s when he founded the newspaper.

    Currently imprisoned by Chinese authorities, Lai has become a powerful symbol of press freedom as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to gain control over Hong Kong’s media and was honoured during CPJ’s award ceremony for his work.

    It is not clear if Facebook applied the action automatically, or whether i-Cable News complained in an attempt to suppress the video.

    The news group, i-Cable, signed an agreement in 2018 with China Mobile Limited, a state-owned telecommunication company, allowing China Mobile to use its content for the next 20 years.

    “It is beyond ironic that a platform which trumpets its commitment to freedom of speech should block a video celebrating journalists who risk their lives and liberty defending it,” CPJ deputy executive director Robert Mahoney said.

    “Facebook must restore the video immediately and provide a clear and timely explanation of why it was censored in the first place.”

    A lawyer at Donaldson and Callif, which vetted the IPFA video for Culture House, the production house that cut the video, told CPJ in an email that the firm was of the opinion that the clip of Lai “constitutes a fair use as used in this IPFA video”.

    The full awards video — and its comments, views and share — remains unavailable to Facebook users worldwide. The IPFA video is still available on YouTube and Twitter.

    CPJ contacted Facebook on November 19 and again on November 22 outlining CPJ’s concerns about the video’s removal but has yet to receive an explanation for the action by the company.

    CPJ has documented examples of US copyright laws being used to censor journalism globally.

    The press freedom organisation has held IPFA award ceremonies since 1991 as a way to honour at-risk journalists around the globe and highlight erosions of press freedom.

    Republished from Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Legal Wrangle Between NYT and O’Keefe Puts Press Freedom at Risk

    “Oh please, dear? For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint,” a patriotic Walter Sobchak tells a diner waitress after she implores him to keep his voice down in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. So iconic is this pop culture reference to American jurisprudence that it was actually cited by a Texas judge in a First Amendment case (Business Insider, 9/5/14). 

    John Goodman as Walter Sobchak in the Big Lebowski

    John Goodman as Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: “Oh please, dear? For your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint!” The NYT case shows his absolutism was overstated.

    Yet Sobchak’s absolutism was overstated. The line is a reference to the famous Pentagon Papers case of 1971, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not restrain the New York Times and the Washington Post ahead of time from publishing classified documents pertaining to the Vietnam War.

    But the court did not strike down prior restraint outright. As attorney Floyd Abrams, who represented the Times in the case, later wrote, “A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases, but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press” (New York Times, 6/9/21). Indeed, Chief Justice Warren Burger said in his dissenting opinion that the court had given the press too much power over the state:

    But why should the United States government, from whom this information was illegally acquired by someone, along with all the counsel, trial judges and appellate judges, be placed under needless pressure? After these months of deferral, the alleged “right to know” has somehow and suddenly become a right that must be vindicated instanter.

    Would it have been unreasonable, since the newspaper could anticipate the government’s objections to release of secret material, to give the government an opportunity to review the entire collection and determine whether agreement could be reached on publication?

    Burger outlined the road not taken by the Supreme Court: one in which news outlets could be prevented from revealing the secrets of the state until “agreement could be reached” with the government about whether it wanted its secrets revealed.

    NYT under prior restraint

    That’s why it rang alarm bells among First Amendment advocates when Westchester County Judge Charles Wood ruled in favor of the right-wing organization Project Veritas against the New York Times, enjoining the paper from reporting on certain documents related to the group (New York Times, 11/18/21). New York Appellate Court Judge Leonard Austin refused to lift the block while the case makes its way through appeals (Reuters, 11/22/21), and the original judge extended the order “at least until December 1, a deadline for Project Veritas to respond in writing to the Times‘ bid to end it” (Reuters, 11/23/21).

    “We’re disappointed that the order remains in place, but we welcomed the opportunity to address the court directly on the serious First Amendment concerns raised by a prior restraint,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokesperson (New York Times, 11/23/21), who added, “No libel plaintiffs should be permitted to use their litigation as a tool to silence press coverage about them.”

    James O'Keefe in cartoon pimp costume

    James O’Keefe is perhaps most famous for tricking corporate media—including the Times—into believing he went into ACORN offices dressed in this cartoonish pimp costume, leading to the community organizing group’s demise (FAIR.org, 3/11/10).

    For anyone who needs a reminder, Project Veritas is a video entrapment organization founded by right-wing activist James O’Keefe; it targets progressive organizations as well as media outlets, usually by offering deceptively edited undercover footage to suggest wrongdoing or corruption. The group has had its successes, including its 2009 hoax about the community activist group ACORN (FAIR.org, 3/11/10) that fatally hurt its reputation, even though O’Keefe ended up agreeing to pay $100,000 to a former ACORN employee for “misrepresenting him in a widely distributed video” (Guardian, 3/8/13). 

    O’Keefe has also faced federal charges for attempting to tamper with the phone of then-Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu (Washington Post, 1/27/10), and his organization got caught trying to feed a false story about Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore to the Washington Post (11/27/17). O’Keefe similarly attempted to embarrass NPR; as FAIR pointed out, even when its misrepresentations are exposed, Project Veritas is able to insert enough innuendo into the discourse that its fake stories do real damage (FAIR.org, 8/26/11). The group experienced a boom in conservative financial support during the Trump administration (New York Times, 5/13/21).

    ‘To embarrass an adversary’

    The recent court order against the Times is related to its coverage (11/11/20) of the legal advice Project Veritas gets on using undercover operations to embarrass liberal politicians, organizations and activists. The article cited memos by Project Veritas lawyer Benjamin Barr, which the group maintains are protected by attorney/client privilege. 

    Project Veritas claimed that the Times reported on the memos, Reuters reported, “to harm and embarrass a litigation adversary”: Veritas was already suing the Times over its coverage (9/29/20) of a Veritas video that is meant to show that Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar committed voter fraud. While conservatives trumpeted this concocted outrage (New York Post, 9/27/20), USA Today (10/16/20) reported that there “is no actual proof of fraud or any relationship between individuals in the video and Omar or her campaign.”

    The Times may, indeed, emerge victorious in the end, but the fact that it has been prohibited at least for a time from publishing journalism, and must even fight off the possibility that a right-wing activist group may be able to essentially edit and censor a story after it is published, has press advocates worried. A victory for Project Veritas in this instance would be a significant victory for the right in its campaign against freedom of the press.

    Curtailing press freedom

    In 2019, Politico (9/23/19) outlined a string of court rulings curtailing US press freedom, including how

    the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit against the Times by Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee…[who] complained that a Times editorial published in 2017 inaccurately linked her to the 2011 shooting rampage in Arizona that gravely wounded then-Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others.

    After ordering an unusual hearing, a US District Court judge in New York accepted testimony by the Times’ editorial page editor, James Bennet, that the reference was a mistake, but the three-judge appeals court panel faulted that ruling and unanimously reinstated the suit. The appeals judges said Palin should have the right to issue subpoenas for records and demand testimony to prove her case.

    Sarah Palin

    Sarah Palin filed a libel lawsuit against the Times, in another case threatening press freedom.

    The “case” referred to was Palin’s contention that Bennet and the Times intentionally lied about her having a connection to the shooting.

    This case was part of a trend, as the next day, Judge Amos Mazzant, a federal district judge in Texas

    dealt a blow to NPR by rejecting the network’s motion to throw out a $57 million lawsuit challenging its reporting about efforts by a conservative investor, Ed Butowsky, to stir up interest in the death of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, and the unsubstantiated possibility that he leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks. 

    Mazzant “said the NPR reports implied ‘wrongdoing’ by the investor, and were not protected by privileges for reporting on public legal filings.”

    The previous year, Bruce Brown (Time, 2/5/18), the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, wrote that then-President Donald Trump’s intentions of changing libel laws to stifle journalists hostile to administration was proof that the political and legal movement against press freedom was “mobilizing.”

    FAIR (3/26/21) also reported on one prominent conservative judge who had resurrected the judicial right’s animosity toward New York Times v. Sullivan, which in 1964 held that plaintiffs who are public figures must prove “actual malice” to win a libel suit.

    ‘Everything else is PR’

    The clash between the Times and Project Veritas comes as the latter has had to fight its own battles against the government. The Committee to Protect Journalists (11/15/21) reported that the “FBI seized O’Keefe’s cellphones during a November 6 raid on his home in Mamaroneck, New York, as part of a court-ordered investigation into the theft of a diary” of President Biden’s daughter Ashley, a raid the CPJ “expressed concern” about, while also questioning Veritas‘ methods.

    Without suggesting that Veritas‘ style of journalism has any value in itself, the raid on its offices is still troubling (Dissenter, 11/17/21). While it is certainly possible to imagine O’Keefe committing an actual crime in the guise of practicing journalism, on its face the search seems to be justified on the dubious equation of holding unauthorized documents with possession of stolen goods (FAIR.org, 10/6/16).

    And while it’s hard to imagine a legitimate public interest in the contents of Ashley Biden’s personal diary, the entire notion of accountability journalism is based on leaked documents and information that people in power don’t want to be seen by the masses. As George Orwell probably didn’t say: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” 

    Thus the criminal investigation into Veritas‘ reporting may reflect the same effort to chill journalism that Veritas is taking part in by suing the New York Times. If the prior restraint it sought stands up, that opens the door to government agencies, businesses and powerful individuals using the courts to keep journalists from pursuing stories that could embarrass them or question their authority.

    A loss by the Times would be a victory for the right, which views the free press not as a pillar of free discourse, but an organized enemy of the Republican Party, commerce and Christianity (Politico, 1/27/17). A victory for Project Veritas, which very much embodies that political movement, will give the right a new legal lever to use against journalists and keep the public in the dark.

    The post Legal Wrangle Between NYT and O’Keefe Puts Press Freedom at Risk appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Librarians Resist Bans on Children’s Books with Black, LGBTQ+ Authors

    Girl reaching for book on library shelf

    Gender Queer. Sex Is a Funny Word. The Hate U Give.

    These are just a few of the hundreds of books targeted for banning amid a revived movement to limit students’ access to literature about race, sex and gender and to challenge curricula that broach these topics. In October, the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom announced that it recorded 60 percent more challenges to books in September 2021 than it had recorded during the same month last year.

    Across the country — from Florida to California — efforts to censor books and give parents more say in what their kids read have intensified. The discussion has shown up in political campaigns, as in Republican Glenn Youngkin’s campaign ad in Virginia featuring a mother who objected to her son reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Texas politicians, including Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Matt Krause, plan to monitor school book collections. And in Wyoming and Washington, community members have demanded that library and school personnel be prosecuted for exposing youth to “obscene” literature.

    As books for youth are increasingly scrutinized, some librarians are resisting. They’re ignoring lawmakers’ requests to compile lists of books in their libraries that touch on race, gender, and sexuality issues. They’re defending their book collection policies in the wake of legal threats, and, in some cases, they’re resigning in protest. Libraries stock a wide range of books to meet the needs of diverse readers, librarians say, and young people need to see their experiences represented in literature — all the more so if they belong to groups that have been historically overlooked in publishing.

    Angie Manfredi, who has been a librarian since 2007, said that the larger implication of the book banning movement is that some individuals want all books about African-American and LGBTQ+ people removed. They don’t want their children to learn about the experiences of underrepresented groups, including their struggles for equality, she said.

    The movement’s goal is to “get people scared…that their kids are reading books that say queer people have a right to exist,” Manfredi said. “People need to understand it’s not How to Be an Anti-Racist,” she continued, referring to the bestseller by Ibram X. Kendi. “It’s Black people exist. It’s not This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson. It’s gay people exist.”

    Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said the backlash against many of these books is part of a “cynical campaign” by groups who object to civil liberties for LGBTQ+ people. They’ve characterized all books related to the LGBTQ+ experience as inappropriate for minors, which she calls a “total misrepresentation.”

    “Book censorship has been with us for decades,” she added. In fact, some of the books that schools districts have recently banned, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, have faced censorship for many years. First published in 1985, the novel explores women’s rights, sexuality, and sexual assault in a dystopian society.

    “We can go back to the efforts in the 1950s under McCarthy to erase anything to do with socialism or communism from our society,” Caldwell-Stone said. “In the 1990s, there was a real effort by some groups to get rid of what they called secular humanism in public schools and public libraries. And now we’re seeing a rising effort to erase materials dealing with the Black American experience or the experiences of transgender people.”

    Manfredi left her librarian job in Iowa in August, fearful that she could no longer say that race and gender bias exist while working in a state that banned critical race theory, an academic framework that posits that racism isn’t just about personal prejudice but about institutions and policies. It also prohibits trainings in state institutions that oppose the concept of colorblindness, or that people “should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex.”

    Manfredi said the law, which went into effect July 1, would’ve prevented her from performing her job adequately, as she trained other librarians in her role at the State Library of Iowa. Implicit bias and racism in publishing often came up during these sessions, she said.

    “In a training about storytime, I have to be able to say, ‘The statistics tell us that more books every year for children are published about trucks and cartoon animals than about Native Americans, and we need to look at why that is and what we can do as librarians to change that dynamic,’” Manfredi said. “‘So, I’m going to tell you about some books to share in storytime that aren’t about trucks and that can help you get over your implicit bias.’”

    Now that she has left the State Library of Iowa, Manfredi is preparing to serve as a substitute school librarian in New Mexico. But she’s also encouraging fellow librarians to take steps to defend their book collections in a political climate that’s seen Iowa school board candidates vow to expose students who check out LGBTQ+-related books.

    She advises librarians to become deeply familiar with the books in their collections, develop a detailed plan for responding to complaints and memorize their collection development policies. These policies are the foundation for how libraries select, collect and maintain their books; they also include protocols for responding to concerns about books.

    In Texas, librarians are already taking these steps as policymakers and parents stoke outrage about children reading books related to gender, sexuality and race.

    Pointing to books by LGBTQ+ authors such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, Gov. Greg Abbott last week instructed the Texas Education Agency, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, and State Board of Education to devise guidelines to prevent children from accessing “overtly sexual” literature in schools. The move follows state Rep. Matt Krause’s October 25 letter to the Texas Education Agency and select superintendents asking whether schools have copies of 850 books that he explained “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” A Dallas Morning News analysis of the list found that 97 of the first 100 books Krause targeted were written by women, people of color, and LGTBQ+ authors. Krause is also asking schools to identify any books they own that discuss race or sex.

    Jill Bellomy, the chair for the Texas Association of School Librarians and the lead librarian for the Highland Park Independent School District in Amarillo, Texas, said recent efforts to “silence the voices” of authors “is very disheartening for us and hard to deal with.”

    “We completely understand that a parent would have the right to decide what their child reads,” Bellomy said. “But our problem always is when a parent decides that they think they need to decide what’s best for every child in that school or that district. So, when we start seeing this restricting of access to material, it’s very concerning.”

    Bellomy said that her district has not received Krause’s letter but calls his request “very difficult to meet,” especially as librarians aim to include a wide array of books in their collections and staffing shortages in schools give teacher-librarians a limited amount of time to complete such a lengthy task. Although the Fort Worth Independent School District said that it would comply with Krause’s request, other school districts, such as Austin ISD and Dallas ISD, said that they would not. Texas House Democrats have told school districts that they have no obligation to respond to the letter, which listed a November 12 deadline.

    Bellomy said that Krause’s effort is also unnecessary.

    “If a student or a parent does want to challenge a book, which is totally their right, we have a whole procedure to go through to do that,” she said. “And so it concerns us when they’re not going through these procedures, and they’re calling for instant removal of a book or lists of books.”

    Although the process to remove books varies slightly from one school district to another, the protocol is roughly the same statewide, Bellomy said. Typically, complainants are first asked if they read the entire book or select passages of it. If they had read the whole book, they would then fill out a form explaining their problems with the material, and from there, a committee of administrators, faculty members and, sometimes, students would meet to discuss the book and review the concerns. Next, the committee would recommend keeping or removing the book, a decision school administrators or school board members would ultimately uphold or reverse.

    Bellomy wants the public to know not only that they have the right to challenge books but also that librarians carefully curate the materials in the library. In addition to the selection procedures and policies they have in place, librarians consult professionally reviewed journals to decide which books to acquire for different grade levels.

    Some librarians have become so demoralized by the book banning movement that they’re considering leaving the profession, Bellomy said. But others, she added, are writing to their state representatives, enlisting the support of parents opposed to censorship and organizing social media campaigns about the importance of diverse books.

    “Some of us are feeling galvanized and that this is our time to speak up,” she said. “We’re going to fight to protect those collections and make sure our kids have access to books where they see themselves and they see others and hopefully are growing in empathy because that’s why we do what we do.”

    School libraries aren’t the only ones experiencing outcry about their collections. Since the summer, Campbell County Public Library in Gillette, Wyoming, has faced protests from community members who object to it hiring a transgender magician to perform for youth and to its collection of LGBTQ+ books for teens. Community members also oppose its books about witchcraft and addiction, and a pastor took issue with the titles How Do You Make a Baby, Doing It and Sex Is a Funny Word.

    In October, two residents filed a complaint with the Campbell County sheriff’s office accusing the library’s board and staff of violating obscenity laws. The special prosecutor appointed to the case declined to pursue charges.

    The Wyoming Library Association’s president, Jeff Collins, finds it “unbelievable” that Campbell County Public Library was accused of providing “materials that are obscene or harmful to minors.” He urges parents to discuss with children which reading materials are appropriate for their households but opposes efforts to limit what the entire community reads.

    Public libraries are designed to be “welcoming and inclusive institutions that serve everyone in the community,” he said. “So libraries have a responsibility to avoid bias and to ensure that the materials and the programs they offer represent diverse views and encompass all topics of interest throughout the community.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Collusion: The End of Nature, Brought to us by Zoom

    The only way to break through a totalitarian (lite) thinking is to continue using blunt force, or airy force, to expose this massive experiment in turning Americans into screen dwellers. The new ghetto is the screen.

    The lockdown might be lifted, physically, for the Covdians, but in the minds of these people, the world is now shifting to the high tech, fiber optic, 5G/6G satellite-directed world.

    Imagine this event, on the ecosystems of my area, now, a virtual event. It is embarrassing that science-minded people want public and community participation over zoom. No depth to why it has to be “virtual,” and no apologies for being so dense.

    Or, are they dense? Are they loving this hybrid, virtual, remote work mentality? You know, I was just interviewed by the State of Oregon for a state job. The thing was on Zoom, and there were three there and me here. One question was around “how would you make virtual meetings and intakes more engaging . . . . ?” This is the new normal, alas, and this huge shift of bricks and mortar life, into the AI void, and with these huge (massive) transfers of trillions to a very few felons of the elite class, these scientists who have grants and faculty positions and tenure, they will not lead the way anywhere.

    And their world is all fancy web-based crap, like cool photos, imaginary graphics, all compressed and collected to make people say, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful how wonderful the scientists working in the wonderful natural world are!!’

     

    In this Greta-and-Company-Can-Fly-to-GLasgow-to-Protest-Their-Governments’-Fossil-Fuel-Lunacy, many people I know are so happy now that Zoom is a fixture in their lives, and that they do not have to brave the Highway 101, or the weather, or the climate warnings. These people who might be interested in ecology and marine preserves and environmental policy are usually on the left trough of the manure pile of politics called Democrats. They are, of course, the new Brown Shirts, but call them Green Shirts, or Zoom Shirts. Their world, and the one they are ushering in since youth, have no say in how things SHOULD be run. It is not a real world, but one that is full of maps and podcasts and TED Talks and faux interactive chats and Zooms:

    We are talking about 14 square miles designated as a marine reserve. Then some overflow for seabird protection area. This is, again, embarrassing. There is an interpretive center at Cape Perpetua, one that I have been at for in-person events. There are parking spaces. There are so many ways these great thinkers and planners could have organized an in-person event, even with their defective masks and asinine social distancing. That, my friends, will not happen. More and more youth are getting more and more skills with the mouse, the CAD programs, with Publisher and Photoshop. Their world is a world where billionaires own everything, and living in a van with full bed, TV, running water, hell, that is what youth are going to be having to accept as more and more dictatorial thinkers run the world, run events, run programs and educational frameworks.

    Between Florence and Yachats lies the Cape Perpetua area, a biodiverse recreation mecca home to lush coastal rainforests and deep cultural history. But past the coastline also lies the largest Oregon marine reserve. The Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve is dedicated to the research and conservation of ocean ecosystem, where take of wildlife and human development is restricted. Cape Perpetua area also contains two Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and a seabird protection area. Unlike the reserve, these protected areas allow limited take in their boundaries.

    Within the reserve, creatures large and small live in various habitats from sand, gravel, to some of the most biologically diverse rocky intertidal habitats anywhere on the Pacific Northwest. These creatures live in a unique ecosystem shaped by the ever-changing weather and tides. Some days, strong winds will pull cold, oxygen-rich water and plankton up to the surface in a process called upwelling, while on other, more stagnant days, the water loses its oxygen and becomes hypoxic.

    Because of its dynamic environment, the Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve is home to a plethora of wildlife such as whales, sea lions, seals, pelicans, cormorants, rockfish, and intertidal invertebrates that fuel a complex food web between the land and sea. (source)

    It’s a fear pogrom that is both sophisticated beyond Big Brother, and yet, right to the primary brain center of reptilian stupidity and violence.

    Here, Edward Curtain over at Dissident Voice, covers this fear, this divide, etc. Source.

    Edward Curtin returns to discuss deep politics and what links the assassination of JFK, 9/11, and Covid-19. No president since Kennedy has dared to buck the Military-Industrial-Complex, including Trump, who is part of the same system that produced both Obama and Biden. He discusses the 1967 CIA memo which told mainstream media to use the disparaging term “conspiracy theory” to quell all deviation from the official narrative, and how this propaganda technique has continued to function from JFK to 9/11 to Covid-19. Many of the same actors involved in the MIC and 9/11 continue to be involved with the drug companies, CDC, WEF, WHO, Gates Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. It’s very obvious, but the story is so frightening people don’t want to do any homework. Too many people think there is this war going on between the right and the left, in the larger frame of reference there is no difference, it’s the warfare state against the regular people, the rich versus the poor. The 4IR is an effort for total political and economic control of peoples all over the world. He believes the purpose of the vaccine mandate is for political control. Ultimately, we are in a spiritual war. The Geopolitics & Empire Podcast conducts interviews with high-profile guests on geopolitics and international affairs seeking to gain insight from experts on both the left and the right as to the true nature of current events. Read other articles by Geopolitics & Empire, or visit Geopolitics & Empire’s website.

    The tricksters are at it and have been for decades. The worker — that is teachers and faculty, too, especially — is the enemy. The students are the enemy. So many billions pumped into studying the brain, psychology, neurosciences, behavioral psychiatry, etc. I saw this in 1983 when I was a graduate student, teaching college English. Some of these long in the tooth folk, who want their Vermont or Hawaii lives, but still be the teacher of record for our campus, UT-El Paso. That’s Texas, and already in the 1980s these folk wanted hybrid classes, on-line. Imagine that, critical thinking and debating writing classes, on line! Before ZOOM.

    Oh, big companies would “give” laptops to workers — Ford, IBM, HP — not as gifts, but to extract MORE work out of the 40 hour week, and that is now 50 or 60 hours. That is, well, the beginning of technology destroying every aspect of our real selves.

    Now, community colleges are up shit creek, pre-planned-demic, but now, too. Imagine, more and more pieces of the state budget pie reduced for Podunk community colleges — vital places of not just learning, but community events, incubators of thinking, and connections to much more than just academia. So, more and more raised tuitions, more and more part-time faculty hired, more and more hybrid classes, and now, the Zoom Doom. Imagine, one teacher on Zoom running a class of 80, 90? This is the new normal — kill the person.

    The online option seems to work for all kinds of students. When the financial-aid team returned to campus in August, Bohanon opened up her schedule for in-person appointments. For the first week, no one registered to see her. She told her supervisor she wanted to add online appointments again, and reserved 8 a.m. to noon for online and the rest of the day for in-person walk-ins. “In the morning when I come in — full,” she says. Afternoon? Nothing.” Now her schedule is full every day, but all her appointments are virtual.

    The push-and-pull between in-person and online courses continues for students at Southwest, but it may be starting to shift toward the latter. One of the pieces of conventional wisdom about community colleges during the pandemic is that students often dislike or fear online learning — a refrain repeated often at Southwest. But more than a year and a half after colleges transitioned to large-scale distance learning, many of the students at Southwest who persisted have begun to favor online sections over the nearly 40 percent of courses being taught in person.

    Rebuild? Time for a revolution inside K12 and higher education. Regroup? Revolt neoliberalism and illiberalism and the constant attack on education. Or, attack on schooling. Constant attack on learning! These so-called leaders have collapsed, and they have crawled under their retirement accounts, and they are seeing-hearing-speaking no evil. This is the Chronicle of Higher Education, a very retrograde, conservative, cover-their-asses-rag!

    The new normal is being accepted by the masses, but the mealy mouthed academics and those on the peripheral of academia are coming out like flies on shit:

    Southwest and other community colleges may just have to wait out Covid. Even if the virus doesn’t completely go away, the risks may get lower and people may become more accustomed to living with it. “I really think that’s going to be the biggest thing, is time,” Brown says, “and people feeling it’s safe to completely return to, we won’t call it normal, but like the new normal.”

    If there’s one thing community colleges should not do, says Eddy, of William & Mary, it’s go back to normal. “It would be a mistake to think, I just need to wait this out to come to a time where we’re going to have more openness,” she says. After a decade of gradually declining enrollments, the pandemic has brought community colleges to an inflection point where they have a chance to — may even be impelled to — make some changes, many perhaps overdue.

    Read the article, and look between the lines. These people are stating that the planned pandemic made virtual learning more onerous because students didn’t have laptops and Wi-Fi, and didn’t know what a JPEG or PDF were. Oh, you get it, don’t you? Get those students free (US taxpayer paid for) computers and free (US taxpayer paid for) Wi-Fi. Bootcamps for Microsoft Office 10.0 Adobe workshops. Get those students to be on-line warriors. Take it, and you can’t leave it or you will be cancelled from society.

    And this all goes back to the Zoom event, about Cape Perpetua, about 12 miles from where I live, via Highway 101. You think there will be regard for people who want trails for hiking, trails for biking, rivers for kayaking? You think that the overlords want to have us out in nature, out along highways and by-ways? These overlords want to own the world, the land, the forests, the farms, all of it, and they want security, and they want no trespassing, and they want no by-standers and witnesses.

    The scientists just take it, because that’s what mechanistic folk do — strip away the A from STEAM — Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math.

    This is the motherfucker, the mentality, the demented thought process, and the messed up media, all the brainwashed fuckers of the world, in a nutshell:

    “I Don’t Think We Should Ever Shake Hands Again.” Dr. Fauci Says Coronavirus Should Change Some Behaviors for Good

    These are madmen:

    Madman and madwoman —

    Joe Biden CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Takes Over Institution in Crisis - Bloomberg

    Terrorists and war criminals —

    World Economic Forum: a history and analysis | Transnational Institute

    Billionaires ‘R Us —

    Davos 2020: What is the World Economic Forum and is it elitist? - BBC News

    This is it, man, the last frontier — education! Covid car, online programs, internet-access solutions. If you read this site, The Chronicle of Higher Education, there is not pushback, no discussion of the 4IR, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

    Oh, the senseless stupidity of it all, the Covid Van.

    MahoneyCar-1109.jpg
    The post Collusion: The End of Nature, Brought to us by Zoom first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hold High the Children

    It’s that crucial scene near the end of The Dead Zone. Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) has just bungled an assassination attempt, the bullet from his rifle missing Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a ruthless and ambitious presidential candidate. In panic and fear, Stillson wrenches a small child from the grasp of his mother and holds the boy before him as a shield to any other bullet that might follow.

    Today, in Texas and elsewhere, children are held aloft by pretentious adults. It’s meant to appear as a protective act, and it is, but it’s not the children that are being protected. In the manner of a cowardly Mr. Stillson, parents and politicians hide behind the amplified fragility of children to shield their own fears and political ambitions.

    It’s most evident in the brouhaha that school systems find themselves enmeshed in over the trope of “Critical Race Theory.” There’s an absurdity to the brawl: CRT doesn’t exist where it’s fought over most. “Critical Race Theory” is a graduate level study course (beyond K-12) that examines the presence and ramifications of institutional racism. That it does exist somewhere is enough for fear mongers to charge its presence in any K-12 book or classroom setting where the expected topic of race or racism might arise. Its phraseology unfortunately lends itself to an additional diversionary controversy. Use of the word “theory” is easily misappropriated to imply a minority’s experience is “theoretical” and that its inclusion in the presentation of history or current events will taint the “proven” experience of the larger population.

    So, we have parents, educators, and school board members screaming and threatening one another, primarily over the possibility of including a minority’s experience and perspective in history and sociology classes. It’s only just that, inclusion of a perspective that’s often gone missing. It’s not the introduction of a theory; it’s information; it’s knowledge; it’s data. Providing historical context to classrooms or libraries shouldn’t be cringe-worthy, but the triggered reaction is, “OMG, what are we subjecting our innocent little children to?” Politicians fan the flames and “heroically” propose laws that would prohibit schools from teaching lessons that might make students feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race.

    If you’ve ever had children in school, if you’ve ever been a child in school, you know that “psychological distress” is more likely to be experienced on the playground than in the classroom. When you were a child, did you even once feel “guilt” or “anguish” when history lessons touched upon topics like the institution of slavery or the annihilation of Native Americans? Probably not; in our young minds it was only “history” and it all happened like a million years ago. Anguish may have been experienced in our attempts to fit-in or to socialize with classmates, but do you recall ever feeling angst through exposure to a history book or a current event lesson? Books and lectures were either somewhat interesting or totally boring and held about as much threat to the psyche as did the description of a dangling participle. Those (it’s primarily white parents and politicians) who allege their fragile white children will be traumatized by classroom discussions of racial issues are either disingenuous or have forgotten how little they personalized their own exposure to history or sociology lessons as children.

    It’s not about the children, it’s the grown-ups, and it’s as much political as parental. Holding children aloft is a red herring, an attempt to draw attention away from the angst felt by parents and projecting it upon the children. The angst stems from fear of a challenge to comfortably held mindsets, fear that a child will learn a reality at school that challenges the accepted reality at home. Politicians seize the opportunity, stoke smoldering fears into raging flame, and everyone pretends it’s all about saving the children.

    By holding their children aloft, agitated conservatives have gained control of the school board in Southlake, Texas. In early November, Andrew Yeager became the third board member supported by Southlake Families PAC, a group formed by local Republican leaders. The PAC describes itself as “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” Texas State Rep. Matt Krause, an ally of the PAC, recently proposed a list of 850 books to ban from school libraries. He also directed districts to identify any other books that could make students feel guilt or anguish because of their race or sex. Thus far, the Judeo-Christian Bible does not appear on the list of dangerous books. Why not? What could be more distressful to children than learning some of their best friends and perhaps a few relatives will be condemned to an eternity of pain and suffering in Hell? What book could possibly bring more anguish to the mind of an impressionable child? It certainly wouldn’t be a publication like “What is White Privilege” or any of the other 850 books deemed threatening to the comfort level of young children.

    It could be held that public schools are secular and the Bible wouldn’t be found in their libraries whether banned or not. That may be true, but the children are being held aloft by a PAC that is “unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values.” Is it possible to be rooted in Christian values and not have a Bible at home? Assuming its fixture in the home (and that it’s read), why would parents be so concerned with the presence of a book in school that might cause a child’s discomfort, but have no concern with the presence of a book at home that’s sure to cause anguish (if it’s read)? The answer of course, is that the discomfort of children is not really the issue; it’s the discomfort of adults.

    That the discomfort’s initial focus was on “critical race theory” is an indication of parental reluctance to disturb comfortably held sentiments on issues of race. The initial focus has expanded, but the same can be said for parental/PAC reluctance to have LGBTQ issues addressed in classroom settings. As with CRT, it’s not concern for what the children might feel; it’s concern for what the children might learn, and what the children might learn might make the parents feel challenged, and if the parents feel challenged, they might feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress.” Yes, it is about the fragility of vulnerable minds, but it’s the brittle minds of adults that feel threatened.

    Making it appear to be about the children allows parents, politicians, and a PAC rooted in Judeo-Christian values to hide their fear and ambition behind the pretense of a noble cause: It’s all about the children. Sure it is, Mr. Stillson; hold high the children; hold high the cross.

    The post Hold High the Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Censorship Is The Last Gasp Of The Liberal Class

    On November 8, 2021, Twitter locked my account for a period of one day for responding to corporate media darling and Russiagate fanatic Keith Olbermann’s slanderous reply to journalist Wyatt Reed’s coverage of the Nicaraguan election. The flagged tweet simply restated Olbermann’s question, replacing “whore for a dictator” with “whoring for the American oligarchy.” Twitter demanded that I delete the tweet or send a time-consuming, lengthy appeal with no assurances as to if or when my sentence in “Twitter jail” would end. This prompted me to delete the tweet and wait for the 12-hour suspension to end. Keith Olbermann’s account went unscathed.

    This isn’t Olbermann’s first go-round with censorship.

    The post Censorship Is The Last Gasp Of The Liberal Class appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Twitter Imposing Ghost-Ban Censorship On Tibettruth

    Twitter Imposing Ghost-Ban Censorship On Tibettruth

    Image: courtesy of our Twitter account @tibettruth

    This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.