Category: Social media

April 1, 2021

Facebook Removes Lara Trump Video, Saying All Content in Trump’s Voice Is Banned

An interview on Facebook of former President Donald Trump, conducted by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump (who also posted the video to her page), was removed by the company for promoting the “voice” of the former chief executive, who was banned from the social media site earlier this year over fears of him inciting violence.

The decision to remove the video was made by Facebook on Wednesday. In an email the company sent to Lara Trump, who is married to Donald Trump’s son Eric, Facebook explained that content from the former president would not be permitted under circumstances where it is deemed that Trump is trying to circumvent the ban imposed on him.

“In line with the block we placed on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, further content posted in the voice of Donald Trump will be removed and result in additional limitations on the accounts,” the email, which Lara Trump posted to her Instagram account, said.

In a hyperbolic response to that email, Lara Trump wrote that Facebook’s decision was taking the country “one step closer to Orwell’s 1984,” referencing a dystopian novel by author George Orwell in which a government (not a private company) controls all aspects of citizens’ lives.

The decision by the social media company indicates that its ban on the former president will likely extend to other users who have a connection to Trump. Indeed, in a subsequent email to Lara Trump, Facebook further elaborated that the guidance being used for her post was also being applied to all campaign accounts associated with Trump, former Trump surrogates, and other means of messaging affiliated with the former president.

Trump was banned indefinitely from Facebook in early January for his role in inciting a mob of his loyalists to attack the U.S. Capitol building during the certification of the Electoral College on January 6.

“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote the day after the Capitol breach.

Trump has demonstrated in recent days that he intends to find other ways to keep a presence on the internet. Earlier this week, the former president launched his own website, touting himself as a “magnificent” leader while ignoring the numerous controversies that took place under his watch, his two impeachments, and his attempt to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential race. Trump also used the site to deflect blame on China for the nearly half million coronavirus deaths in the U.S. that occurred during his tenure, suggesting that it had nothing to do with his leadership style, in spite of what former officials who had served under him are now saying.

Trump is also reportedly planning to start his own social media site. According to sources that have spoken to Fox News about the matter, Trump is “moving forward” with the project, which would allow him to interact with his supporters without facing repercussions for violent and incendiary rhetoric he may generate.

“President Trump will have his voice back one way or another,” one source told Fox.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
March 31, 2021

Content Control

An interview with Jillian C. York, the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
March 29, 2021

Cancelling Art, Dark Mofo and the Offended Classes

Last week, Australians found themselves delighting in another fit of cancel culture, this time in the art world. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo art festival prides itself on being gritty but the mood was very much about removing any grit to begin with. Interest centred on the project of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who had proposed soaking a Union Jack Flag “in the blood of its colonised territories”. The blood would come by way of donations. First Nation peoples “from countries claimed by the British Empire at some point in history, who reside in Australia” would furnish the liquid.

Given what followed, festival organisers might have preferred one of Sierra’s other suggestions: a work that would have involved vast amounts of cocaine. Social media outrage followed. People purporting to speak for the offended, while also counting themselves as offended, railed and expectorated. Festival curator Leigh Carmichael tried to be brave against the howling winds of disapproval. “At this stage we will push on,” he told ABC Radio Hobart on March 23. “Provided we can logistically make this work happen, we will.” He acknowledged that, “These were very dangerous topics, they’re hard, they hurt.” For criticisms that the work was being made by a Spanish artist, Carmichael was initially clear: to make work taboo for people from specific localities could constitute “a form of racism in itself.” Then inevitable equivocation followed. “This artist is about their experience and whether a Spanish artist has the right to weigh in, I don’t know.”

Within a matter of hours, Carmichael’s position had collapsed: Sierra’s project was cut and put out to sea. “We’ve heard the community’s response to Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag.” Grovelling and capitulation before this all powerful community followed. “We made a mistake, and take full responsibility. The project will be cancelled. We apologise to all First Nations people for any hurt that has been caused. We are sorry.”

David Walsh, Tasmanian founder of MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) and responsible for running the festival, was open to self-education and reflection, having not seen “the deeper consequences of this proposition”. He had thought the work “would appeal to the usual leftie demographic. I approved it without much thought (as has become obvious).” A bit of old fashioned, censoring conservatism was called for.

Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes and artistic director of Mona Foma, the museum’s summer festival, felt righteous, firstly, wanting to distance his own outfit as “a completely different and separate organisation” before weighing into rubbishing the cultural sensitivity credentials of the work and the artist. “Exploiting people while claiming to protest on their behalf is intellectually void. Stupid programming is aesthetically null. Controversy outweighing the quality of the work is bad art.”

The cancellation was approved by the bloated entities across the academy, certain ethnic groups and the professionally enraged. Critique ranged from the identity of the artist (Spanish, foreigner, coloniser) to the merits of the work itself. “A coloniser artist intending to produce art with the actual blood of colonised people is abusive, colonising and re-traumatising,” came the social worker assessment from novelist Claire G. Coleman. “The idea is disgusting and terrible and should not have been considered.”

If every traumatic, disgusting incident (rape, pillage, massacres, wars, the crucifixion) were to be considered a bad idea for representation, the canvasses best be left empty, the art shows barren. Never depict, for instance, that Tasmania’s lands are blood soaked by European conquest. Do not, as Australian artist Mike Parr did in June 2018, bury yourself beneath a busy street of the state capital Hobart to get to the hidden truth. That way lies trauma.

The art content commissars were also keeping close eye over how the depiction might have been properly staged, if it was even possible. Such a contribution can be found in the journal Overland. “Simply stating or depicting that the beginnings of the Australian colony were brutal and bloody for Indigenous people is a passive act,” moaned the very selective Cass Lynch. She demands, expects. “The concept on its own isn’t active as an agent of truth-telling, it doesn’t contain an indigenous vice or testimony, it has no nuance. On its own, it leans into the glorification of the gore and the violence of colonisation.” Blood, it would seem, is no indicator of truth.

In such convulsions of faux sensitivity to the First Nations, the arts sector (for this is what it has become in Australia, a corporatized, sanitised cobbling of blandness, branding and safe bets) justified not merely the pulling of the piece, but that it should have ever been contemplated to begin with. In the commentary on Sierra, the Indigenous peoples are spoken of in abstract and universal terms: they were hurt and all have one, monolithic voice; and “white curators” should have thought better in letting the project ever get off the ground. Thinking in cultural police terms, Paola Balla asked “how this was allowed to be programmed in the first place? And what structures support white curators to speak of Black traumas?” Such questions are bound to embolden art vandals across the world keen on emptying every museum for being inappropriately informed about “power structures”.

Ironically enough, in this swell of ranting about voices and representation, the artist in question was deprived of it. Sierra, in a statement released on March 25, called treatment of his work “superficial and spectacular” and his own treatment as a “public lynching”. His quotes had been misconstrued; he had been “left without a voice, without the capacity to explain and defend” his project. He had hoped the blood-soaked Union Jack would inspire reflection “on the material on which states and empires are built” and reveal how “all blood is equally red and has the same consistency, regardless of the race or culture of the person supplying it”.

Sierra’s shabby treatment did not go unnoticed. Parr took issue with the festival organisers’ “cowardice and lack of leadership”. Michael Mansell, Chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania urged Carmichael to push on with the work. “The artist challenges Tasmanians about whether Aboriginal lands were peacefully or violently taken, and uses the blood-smattered Union Jack to express his view.” By all means disagree with the artist and even feel offended “but that cannot justify stifling the artist’s freedom of thought.” A sinister result had followed from the cancellation of the project. “The unintended consequence of the objectors is that the discussion about truth telling will now be ignored, put aside.”

There are parallels in this fiasco with previous instances of rage over what can and cannot be depicted in the shallow art lands of the Antipodes. The cultural police also took issue with Australian photographic artist Bill Henson in 2008 for his portrayals of children as sexual beings. On May 22 that year, twenty Henson photographs featuring “naked children aged 12 and 13” were confiscated by police from Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery. Jason Smith of the Monash Gallery of Art defended Henson, claiming that his work “has consistently explored human conditions of youth, and examined a poignant moment between adolescence and adulthood”.

Then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was having none of it. There were simply certain things you could not touch, that art should not enable you to understand. Henson had erred into vice. “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he spluttered. Rudd found the photographs “absolutely revolting” despite having not seen them. “Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids.” Jenny Macklin, Minister for Families at the time, moralised before the Nine Network about how children were “just getting bombarded with sexualised images all the time, and it’s that sexualisation of children that I think is wrong.” Now, just as then, artists have been put on notice.

This article was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2021 at 10:55pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Indigenous Peoples, Resistance Art, Social media.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 29, 2021

Cancelling Art, Dark Mofo and the Offended Classes

Last week, Australians found themselves delighting in another fit of cancel culture, this time in the art world. Tasmania’s Dark Mofo art festival prides itself on being gritty but the mood was very much about removing any grit to begin with. Interest centred on the project of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who had proposed soaking a Union Jack Flag “in the blood of its colonised territories”. The blood would come by way of donations. First Nation peoples “from countries claimed by the British Empire at some point in history, who reside in Australia” would furnish the liquid.

Given what followed, festival organisers might have preferred one of Sierra’s other suggestions: a work that would have involved vast amounts of cocaine. Social media outrage followed. People purporting to speak for the offended, while also counting themselves as offended, railed and expectorated. Festival curator Leigh Carmichael tried to be brave against the howling winds of disapproval. “At this stage we will push on,” he told ABC Radio Hobart on March 23. “Provided we can logistically make this work happen, we will.” He acknowledged that, “These were very dangerous topics, they’re hard, they hurt.” For criticisms that the work was being made by a Spanish artist, Carmichael was initially clear: to make work taboo for people from specific localities could constitute “a form of racism in itself.” Then inevitable equivocation followed. “This artist is about their experience and whether a Spanish artist has the right to weigh in, I don’t know.”

Within a matter of hours, Carmichael’s position had collapsed: Sierra’s project was cut and put out to sea. “We’ve heard the community’s response to Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag.” Grovelling and capitulation before this all powerful community followed. “We made a mistake, and take full responsibility. The project will be cancelled. We apologise to all First Nations people for any hurt that has been caused. We are sorry.”

David Walsh, Tasmanian founder of MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) and responsible for running the festival, was open to self-education and reflection, having not seen “the deeper consequences of this proposition”. He had thought the work “would appeal to the usual leftie demographic. I approved it without much thought (as has become obvious).” A bit of old fashioned, censoring conservatism was called for.

Brian Ritchie, bassist for the Violent Femmes and artistic director of Mona Foma, the museum’s summer festival, felt righteous, firstly, wanting to distance his own outfit as “a completely different and separate organisation” before weighing into rubbishing the cultural sensitivity credentials of the work and the artist. “Exploiting people while claiming to protest on their behalf is intellectually void. Stupid programming is aesthetically null. Controversy outweighing the quality of the work is bad art.”

The cancellation was approved by the bloated entities across the academy, certain ethnic groups and the professionally enraged. Critique ranged from the identity of the artist (Spanish, foreigner, coloniser) to the merits of the work itself. “A coloniser artist intending to produce art with the actual blood of colonised people is abusive, colonising and re-traumatising,” came the social worker assessment from novelist Claire G. Coleman. “The idea is disgusting and terrible and should not have been considered.”

If every traumatic, disgusting incident (rape, pillage, massacres, wars, the crucifixion) were to be considered a bad idea for representation, the canvasses best be left empty, the art shows barren. Never depict, for instance, that Tasmania’s lands are blood soaked by European conquest. Do not, as Australian artist Mike Parr did in June 2018, bury yourself beneath a busy street of the state capital Hobart to get to the hidden truth. That way lies trauma.

The art content commissars were also keeping close eye over how the depiction might have been properly staged, if it was even possible. Such a contribution can be found in the journal Overland. “Simply stating or depicting that the beginnings of the Australian colony were brutal and bloody for Indigenous people is a passive act,” moaned the very selective Cass Lynch. She demands, expects. “The concept on its own isn’t active as an agent of truth-telling, it doesn’t contain an indigenous vice or testimony, it has no nuance. On its own, it leans into the glorification of the gore and the violence of colonisation.” Blood, it would seem, is no indicator of truth.

In such convulsions of faux sensitivity to the First Nations, the arts sector (for this is what it has become in Australia, a corporatized, sanitised cobbling of blandness, branding and safe bets) justified not merely the pulling of the piece, but that it should have ever been contemplated to begin with. In the commentary on Sierra, the Indigenous peoples are spoken of in abstract and universal terms: they were hurt and all have one, monolithic voice; and “white curators” should have thought better in letting the project ever get off the ground. Thinking in cultural police terms, Paola Balla asked “how this was allowed to be programmed in the first place? And what structures support white curators to speak of Black traumas?” Such questions are bound to embolden art vandals across the world keen on emptying every museum for being inappropriately informed about “power structures”.

Ironically enough, in this swell of ranting about voices and representation, the artist in question was deprived of it. Sierra, in a statement released on March 25, called treatment of his work “superficial and spectacular” and his own treatment as a “public lynching”. His quotes had been misconstrued; he had been “left without a voice, without the capacity to explain and defend” his project. He had hoped the blood-soaked Union Jack would inspire reflection “on the material on which states and empires are built” and reveal how “all blood is equally red and has the same consistency, regardless of the race or culture of the person supplying it”.

Sierra’s shabby treatment did not go unnoticed. Parr took issue with the festival organisers’ “cowardice and lack of leadership”. Michael Mansell, Chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania urged Carmichael to push on with the work. “The artist challenges Tasmanians about whether Aboriginal lands were peacefully or violently taken, and uses the blood-smattered Union Jack to express his view.” By all means disagree with the artist and even feel offended “but that cannot justify stifling the artist’s freedom of thought.” A sinister result had followed from the cancellation of the project. “The unintended consequence of the objectors is that the discussion about truth telling will now be ignored, put aside.”

There are parallels in this fiasco with previous instances of rage over what can and cannot be depicted in the shallow art lands of the Antipodes. The cultural police also took issue with Australian photographic artist Bill Henson in 2008 for his portrayals of children as sexual beings. On May 22 that year, twenty Henson photographs featuring “naked children aged 12 and 13” were confiscated by police from Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery. Jason Smith of the Monash Gallery of Art defended Henson, claiming that his work “has consistently explored human conditions of youth, and examined a poignant moment between adolescence and adulthood”.

Then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was having none of it. There were simply certain things you could not touch, that art should not enable you to understand. Henson had erred into vice. “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he spluttered. Rudd found the photographs “absolutely revolting” despite having not seen them. “Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids.” Jenny Macklin, Minister for Families at the time, moralised before the Nine Network about how children were “just getting bombarded with sexualised images all the time, and it’s that sexualisation of children that I think is wrong.” Now, just as then, artists have been put on notice.
The post Cancelling Art, Dark Mofo and the Offended Classes first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
March 26, 2021

Listen to the Pacific people plea to AUT over diversity future of PMC
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

A retired university professor and a Tahitian doctoral candidate have appealed to Auckland University of Technology to “listen” to the Asia-Pacific people and stakeholders involved in the Pacific Media Centre when making decisions about its future.

The centre has been embroiled in controversy over its leadership succession since early last month when the 13-year centre’s office was suddenly closed and all its memorabilia, archives and Pacific taonga were packed up and stashed in a locked office.

Also, the centre’s media website has not been active for the past three months since the founding director retired last December.
While the university’s School of Communication Studies has claimed that the office was being “moved”, staff involved in the centre were said to be unaware where this was located.

Expressions for interest in the leadership were called for a week ago by the school management and a new director (or co-directors) – an internal appointment – is expected to be announced next month.

Radio 531pi Pacific Days Show host Ma’a Brian Sagala today interviewed the founding director of the centre, Professor David Robie, a former head of journalism at both the universities of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific, and a Tahitian doctoral candidate, Ena Manuireva, who played a key role in the centre’s nuclear-free Pacific project last year, about the future of the centre.

Both expressed serious concern about the future direction with Dr Robie saying there was a serious gap between AUT’s promises and the reality and Manuireva saying that any dilution of the PMC’s cross-disciplinary role would have a negative impact on the “space” that the PMC had provided for Asia-Pacific voices marginalised by mainstream media.

Dr Robie said that his experience over the past two years had been that management had “not listened” to key people involved in the centre or the Pacific and diversity stakeholders represented by the PMC advisory board.

He said he was concerned that a “hidden agenda” was being pushed.

Manuireva said that AUT should demonstrate greater commitment to the centre and listen to the people who ought to be leading in the future.

The Radio 531pi interview today by Ma’a Brian Sagala.

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This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 26, 2021

Listen to the Pacific people plea to AUT over diversity future of PMC

Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

A retired university professor and a Tahitian doctoral candidate have appealed to Auckland University of Technology to “listen” to the Asia-Pacific people and stakeholders involved in the Pacific Media Centre when making decisions about its future.

The centre has been embroiled in controversy over its leadership succession since early last month when the 13-year centre’s office was suddenly closed and all its memorabilia, archives and Pacific taonga were packed up and stashed in a locked office.

Also, the centre’s media website has not been active for the past three months since the founding director retired last December.

While the university’s School of Communication Studies has claimed that the office was being “moved”, staff involved in the centre were said to be unaware where this was located.

Expressions for interest in the leadership were called for a week ago by the school management and a new director (or co-directors) – an internal appointment – is expected to be announced next month.

Radio 531pi Pacific Days Show host Ma’a Brian Sagala today interviewed the founding director of the centre, Professor David Robie, a former head of journalism at both the universities of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific, and a Tahitian doctoral candidate, Ena Manuireva, who played a key role in the centre’s nuclear-free Pacific project last year, about the future of the centre.

Both expressed serious concern about the future direction with Dr Robie saying there was a serious gap between AUT’s promises and the reality and Manuireva saying that any dilution of the PMC’s cross-disciplinary role would have a negative impact on the “space” that the PMC had provided for Asia-Pacific voices marginalised by mainstream media.

Dr Robie said that his experience over the past two years had been that management had “not listened” to key people involved in the centre or the Pacific and diversity stakeholders represented by the PMC advisory board.

He said he was concerned that a “hidden agenda” was being pushed.

Manuireva said that AUT should demonstrate greater commitment to the centre and listen to the people who ought to be leading in the future.

The Radio 531pi interview today by Ma’a Brian Sagala.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 26, 2021

Listen to the Pacific people plea to AUT over diversity future of PMC
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

A retired university professor and a Tahitian doctoral candidate have appealed to Auckland University of Technology to “listen” to the Asia-Pacific people and stakeholders involved in the Pacific Media Centre when making decisions about its future.

The centre has been embroiled in controversy over its leadership succession since early last month when the 13-year centre’s office was suddenly closed and all its memorabilia, archives and Pacific taonga were packed up and stashed in a locked office.

Also, the centre’s media website has not been active for the past three months since the founding director retired last December.
While the university’s School of Communication Studies has claimed that the office was being “moved”, staff involved in the centre were said to be unaware where this was located.

Expressions for interest in the leadership were called for a week ago by the school management and a new director (or co-directors) – an internal appointment – is expected to be announced next month.

Radio 531pi Pacific Days Show host Ma’a Brian Sagala today interviewed the founding director of the centre, Professor David Robie, a former head of journalism at both the universities of Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific, and a Tahitian doctoral candidate, Ena Manuireva, who played a key role in the centre’s nuclear-free Pacific project last year, about the future of the centre.

Both expressed serious concern about the future direction with Dr Robie saying there was a serious gap between AUT’s promises and the reality and Manuireva saying that any dilution of the PMC’s cross-disciplinary role would have a negative impact on the “space” that the PMC had provided for Asia-Pacific voices marginalised by mainstream media.

Dr Robie said that his experience over the past two years had been that management had “not listened” to key people involved in the centre or the Pacific and diversity stakeholders represented by the PMC advisory board.

He said he was concerned that a “hidden agenda” was being pushed.

Manuireva said that AUT should demonstrate greater commitment to the centre and listen to the people who ought to be leading in the future.

The Radio 531pi interview today by Ma’a Brian Sagala.

This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
March 19, 2021

MEAA rethinks press council role and backs need for Facebook media code
MEAA video message on YouTube.

Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) union is reconsidering its involvement in the Australian Press Council and has appealed to members to give feedback on this issue.

Vice-president media Karen Percy has appealed to delegates on a YouTube video to take part in this consultation.

“Members have raised concerns about the lack of financial transparency at the Press Council and rulings that are increasingly out of step with community expectations,” she said.
- READ MORE: Facebook and Google deals may leave small publishers out in the cold
- Download the media bargaining code
If the MEAA leaves, it needs to give four years notice “to end our contributions”, which last year were more than A$100,000.

“That four years gives us time to look at alternative regulatory options, and that’s in line with the MEAA submission to the Senate Inquiry into media diversity which proposes a single entity for self-regulation,” said Percy.

Meanwhile, the MEAA says in a recent statement on its website that Facebook’s recent “ham-fisted handling of its news sharing ban” in Australia – which initially blocked crucial community information and health and government information sites – had revealed the real dangers of an organisation that “abuses its dominant position” and “thumbs its nose at rules and regulations”.

The Australian media bargaining code. Image: MEAA

Last month’s decision by Facebook to unilaterally ban news on hundreds of Australian pages was “the arrogant act of a company with too much power that thinks it is beyond the reach of any government”, the statement said.

Facebook was acting in retaliation to the proposed News Media Bargaining Code, which would force it and Google to compensate media outlets for content that until now has been published on their platforms for free.

While Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code was not a silver bullet to fix the problems within the news media, it was an important step to address the “blatant imbalance between the digital giants” and those who produced public interest news content.

This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
March 16, 2021

Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.

—Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

And that’s just what we know.

More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.

Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the rioters to “justice.”

FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures; tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.

It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

According to USA Today, the FBI is relying on the American public and volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.

This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.

The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their friends are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

The government has the know-how.

It took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots.

Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.

Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring these totalitarian powers.

Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the government for one reason or another.

As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

All it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65% of American adults are happy to provide.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs, judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed by the police to deliver arrest warrants.

License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.

Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those installed on private property.

Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime” cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”

State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However, technology is already available that allows the government to collect biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.

Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked driver’s license.

It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.

Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.

The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart” appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely. These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say, thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the government.

Then again, the government doesn’t really need to spy on you using your smart TV when the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cellphone and record your conversations. The FBI can also do the same thing to laptop computers without the owner knowing any better.

Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics, photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with sophisticated weaponry.

All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence, especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

These digital trails are everywhere.

As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This data—collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem … provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

As Warzel and Thompson warn:

“To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

There is no gray area any longer.
Image credit: K-Plex

Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

March 16, 2021

Sanitized Tyranny: The Weaponization of Truth

On Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol Hill “insurrection”, the Parler social media app was the number #1 most downloaded app in the Apple App Store. On “January 10, 2021, Parler CEO John Matze announced the company had been ‘dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements … Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.’” By Jan. 11, Apple, Google, and Amazon had successfully colluded to destroy the capacity of one of the most popular apps on the web to operate.

It was a blatant violation of antitrust laws during a period in which Big Tech has been repeatedly investigated and accused of similar infractions. In October 2020 top Democratic congressional lawmakers reported that “… Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google engage in a range of anti-competitive behavior, and antitrust laws need an overhaul to allow for more competition in the US internet economy.” The report recommended new legislation that could lead to the breakup of tech giants such as Facebook and Google.

Yet the overnight shutdown of Parler was accompanied by deafening cheers from the media and politicians across the country. While the elimination of a rising competitor no doubt played a significant role in the takedown, ensuring coordinated messaging across the major social media platforms was likely the deciding factor in Parler’s demise. The same journalists and politicians applauded the heroic tech titans just as loudly when Twitter suppressed evidence of Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings three weeks before the election and when Trump was permanently banned from Facebook.

Parler’s targeted takedown by a conspiracy of tech giants signaled a new phase in the war for strategic reality control. The narrative managers find it quite inconvenient that the pandemic propaganda campaign has not gone completely according to plan. Resistance to the mainstream covid story has turned out to be more widespread than expected. There was a whiff of desperation about this open crushing of a rival platform.

Parler’s real offense was to offer a media delivery system designed to foster free speech. Their service was a reaction against the rapidly multiplying and often inscrutable rules about what speech is allowed and what forbidden on the major platforms. Unlike Facebook and Google, Parler’s users choose what they want to see and are allowed to express their beliefs without the risk of being booted off the service for inadequate doublethink.

Parler was not shut down because it allowed violent postings. Calls for violence were far more prevalent on Facebook and Twitter during the Capital Hill “coup attempt.” Its real crime was to provide a platform where users could express ideas that undercut the dominant narrative without fear of censorship. Its brutal shutdown sent a stark warning to potential competitors who might be similarly tempted to open their platforms to free speech.

Domestic Netwar

Since the beginning of the 2020 U.S. election cycle, the tech giants have unleashed multiple large-scale crackdowns on the content that challenges elite narratives. To understand the scale of the current censorship drive, consider a few of the major actions by Facebook and Twitter:

(10/14/2020) The New York Post, which has the 4th largest distribution rank of all newspapers in the U.S., published an article about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, claiming that he traded on his father’s position to obtain a seat worth $50,000 a month on the Board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Two hours after the story broke, Facebook announced that it was “’… reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform’: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article.” This was done before the article had been fact-checked. Shortly after this, Twitter banned “… entirely all users’ ability to share the Post article — not just on their public timeline but even using the platform’s private Direct Messaging feature.” Twitter users who tried to link to the New York Post article received an error message explaining that such linking was disabled due to the potentially harmful nature of the content. Shortly after, Twitter prevented the New York Post from posting any content, though later it was allowed to resume posting. It was a blatant act of censorship designed to influence the election.
(1/7/2021) Facebook bans the sitting President of the United States from further Facebook posting due to events that, according to Mark Zuckerberg, “… clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.” Note that Zuckerberg directly accuses Trump of planning to impede his lawfully elected successor from assuming power with minimal evidence.
(1/8/2021) Twitter permanently removes Trump’s account, “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account … we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Once again, a social media giant accuses the President of inciting violence on the basis of weak evidence.
(1/19/2021) Facebook announced that “As of January 12, 2021, we have identified over 890 militarized social movements to date and in total, removed about 3,400 Pages, 19,500 groups, 120 events, 25,300 Facebook profiles and 7500 Instagram accounts. We’ve also removed about 3,300 Pages, 10,500 groups, 510 events, 18,300 Facebook profiles and 27,300 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against QAnon.”
(2/8/2021) Facebook reported that, “Today … we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
- COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
- Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
- It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
- Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism”

In each case, the de facto union formed between media outlets and the tech giants initiated a massive censorship campaign without provoking the journalistic outrage that would have erupted a few years ago. Open censorship is now not only accepted by mainstream media but celebrated in the post-pandemic world as a much needed “weaponization of truth.”

Accompanying this unprecedented wave of repression is a new subgenre of journalism which Glenn Greenwald describes as “… an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power.” These journalists rationalize their sanitized tyranny as “working in the disinformation space” where their job is to identify offensive memes and shame those responsible for them.

One reason the tech giants have recently abandoned their earlier restraint in eliminating dissident perspectives is that they are now being ridiculed by the world’s most influential media organizations whenever they fail to suppress so-called “fake news” with sufficient zeal. But the more significant reason is that mainstream media outlets are an organic extension of the intelligence apparatus that helped build Google, Facebook, and several other tech giants. These companies supply the tools to detect, demote, and remove content when it threatens their control over internet information.

The attitude of many mainstream journalists is encapsulated in the recent recommendation by a New York Times reporter who called on the Biden administration to, “… put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’” This cross-agency task force leader “… would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws … it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.” This task force would coordinate the forces required for strikes against those found guilty of offering alternative accounts to officially defined reality.

A Wilderness of Mirrors

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” – Unknown.

According to his press, Tristan Harris is the trusted voice of the technological conscience. He co-founded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) to drive a shift toward technology that operationalizes our informational well-being. The top priority in the site’s “Ledger of Harms” is social media users’ rampant addiction to disinformation.

The CHT cites a finding from a recent scientific study that false news “… spreads six times faster than true news. According to researchers, this is because … fake news items usually have a higher emotional content and contain unexpected information which inevitably means that they will be shared and reposted more often.” This finding was based on the work of six fact-checking organizations.

Unfortunately for Tristan, there is a fundamental deception lurking behind the “fake news” meme. Whenever we hear the term it evokes a conditioned reflex that tends to short-circuit any reflection on its actual meaning. “Fake news” is intended to signify falsehoods that qualified information professionals are able to refute based on careful research. This is the rarely questioned myth behind “fact-checking.” However, it is more accurately understood as an ideological trap intended to inculcate a reductive concept of truth that can be easily manipulated to advance elite agendas.

How reliable is the “fact-checking”, the mechanism used by the major platforms to find and remove false news? A few months ago, OffGuardian published an article titled “WHO (Accidentally) Confirms Covid is No More Dangerous Than Flu.” According to a follow-up article, “… the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed ‘about 10%’ of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.” 0.14% is 24 times lower than WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% which was used to justify the lockdowns that devastated the world economy. That would put the IFR rate for covid right in line with the seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.

However, the fact-checking organization known as Health Feedback claimed the following statement to be false, “The coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.” Health Feedback is a member of the WHO-led project Vaccine Safety Net (VSN) which claims that each reviewer “… contributing to our analyses holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals.” Their parent organization Science Feedback works with Facebook as part of its fact-checking program.

Close analysis of the article indicates that the fact-checkers lied about Dr. Ryan’s actual claims. The lie was this: “Ryan said that, according to the WHO’s best estimates, the virus that causes COVID-19 could have infected up to 10% of the global population.” In fact, Ryan stated that “about 10%” was infected, not “up to 10%.” By reducing the size of the infected population, the IFR rate for covid can be bloated to the pandemic proportions needed to drive the elite agenda. To camouflage their mendacity, the fact-checker found a way to avoid directly quoting Dr. Ryan’s actual words by linking to Zero Hedge’s reblog of the article which provides a summary of his statements without quoting them directly.

This egregious example is only one of many that demonstrate how fact-checkers squeeze the facts into the straitjacket of official truth. Since fact-checking is the central pillar of disinformation detection, its failure to stand up to analysis means that the entire superstructure behind the disinformation purge falls apart. As one fact-checking critic put it, “… this is what is known as a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ – a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.” Propaganda can be much amplified by technology, but it is the believability of its stories that drives the strategic reality operation. Its goal is to bury the text of truth under a scaffolding of interpretive lies.

A Bodyguard of Lies

“In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” – Winston Churchill

In the eyes of the elite, it is not the COVID-19 disease that is the existential threat to humanity, but alternative viewpoints about it. The “Doomsday Clock” released by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Jan. 27, 2021 highlighted three existential threats to humanity “… a resurgent nuclear arms race, climate change, and online misinformation about the Covid-19 epidemic.” The key question is whose existence is being threatened by covid misinformation – the planetary population or the great resetters who unleashed it? This could be a sign that the covid propaganda campaign has not lived up to elite expectations.

It’s clear that in the last several months the elite have felt compelled to pursue a much more aggressive disinformation campaign. Facebook recently decided to prohibit all COVID-19 or vaccine-related posts that contain erroneous claims as defined in the “COVID-19 and Vaccine Policy Updates & Protections” posting. The new rule is that any claim that calls into question information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) or other reliable health sources will be removed.

While Mark Zuckerberg constantly invokes AI as the ultimate solution to fake news, research shows that it can support, but not solve the problem of finding and suppressing news stories that undermine dominant narratives. Evaluating the threat, a story might pose depends on awareness of its social and political context. Yet even the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are currently incapable of identifying such contexts. Therefore AI-based content analysis does not yet provide reliable methods for the initial identification of misinformation except in straightforward scenarios such as detecting duplicates of previously debunked stories. Automation can speed up the work of professional fact-checkers, but at this time it can’t replace them.

However, some advanced AI-based approaches have shown promise in the initial detection of dangerous postings. One method is to use AI to detect a story’s pattern of propagation. Since, according to the scientific study by the CHT previously cited, “fake news spreads six times faster than true news”, by scanning for stories with rapid spread patterns, researchers believe that AI might automatically detect information that could endanger official narratives. Using this method, fact-checkers can rapidly sift through a much greater volume of material to uncover offensive memes. The tech giants never seem to consider the possibility that the rapid spread pattern might in some cases be driven by a massive unsatisfied hunger for truth.

Once a story has been tagged as disinformation, both defensive and offensive options need to be evaluated. If it is posted on a controlled social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter, the platform can reduce its distribution, label it, or directly remove it. If it is on a platform that permits free speech such as Parler, the platform itself can be targeted by removing its hosting service in the way Amazon did in the wake of the “violent insurrection” on Capitol Hill.

In the case of websites not hosted on an elite-controlled platform, these can be deplatformed by removing its domain name from the centralized DNS (Domain Name System) that controls access to web sites through its registered name. Since DNS is a centralised system, legal pressure from law enforcement agencies can force the domain name to be deleted so that the website becomes inaccessible. From 2018 to 2019, several police agencies seized 30,500 domain names in 20 different countries.

Further steps may be needed in some cases. In November 2020, “… the national-security states of the U.S. and UK have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to COVID-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.” Journalists who raise unwelcome concerns about covid vaccines can be de-platformed and where feasible, their stories algorithmically erased from the internet.

The UK signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been assigned the task of targeting websites that raise concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine. GHCQ’s cyberwar will not only take down anti-vaccine propaganda but will also seek to “… disrupt the operations of the cyber-actors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.’” These targeted strikes against information terrorists will be coordinated through the “Five Eyes” alliance of intelligence agencies (U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada).

Resisting the Reality Engineers

An alliance of intelligence agencies, fact-checkers, and think tanks have decided that the world population must be electronically immunized against information which undermines approved biosecurity narratives. Their tactical strikes against “disinformation” cloaks an attack on our capacity for independent thought. The algorithms used by the social media giants to generate obsessive user engagement transform us into easily manipulated slaves of semiconscious emotional stimuli. They are not protecting us from “fake news”, but from our own collective powers of discernment.

Yet the current hysteria about “disinformation” is also a tacit admission that mainstream media has lost so much credibility that it has to resort to increasingly harsh censorship to force their former audience to listen to them. An effective resistance strategy must include developing the tools of critical thinking such as the ability to detect logical fallacies. Only by keeping our powers of discernment switched on at all times can we retain both our freedom of thought and the sane vision of the world that it empowers.

Despite the social unrest that false news stories could and did cause, the founding fathers of the United States thought, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that those “… who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties … They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth …”¹ In their minds, part of being an adult was the often-difficult art of distinguishing true from false information. The founders believed that truth is only accessible to free minds and that any attempt to curtail freedom weakens our access to truth.

Image credit: MSNBC

Wu, Tim. 2016. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Kindle Edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 49.

The post Sanitized Tyranny: The Weaponization of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!

OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point.

Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows? In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!

OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above. Critical thinking leads to “vaccine hesitancy,” which is why corporations are working with governments to immediately censor any and all content that deviates from the official Covid-19 narrative and deplatform the authors of such content, or discredit them as “anti-vax disinformationists.”

For example, Children’s Health Defense, which has been reporting on so-called “adverse events” and deaths in connection with the Covid vaccines, despite the fact that, according to the authorities, “there are no safety problems with the vaccines” and “there is no link between Covid-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” In fact, according to the “fact-checkers” at Reuters, these purported “reports of adverse events” “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable!”

Yes, you’re reading between the lines right. The corporate media can’t come right out and say it, but it appears the “anti-vax disinformationists” are fabricating “adverse events” out of whole cloth and hacking them into the VAERS database and other such systems around the world. Worse, they are somehow infiltrating these made-up stories into the mainstream media in order to lure people into “vaccine hesitancy” and stop us from vaccinating every man, woman, and child in the physical universe, repeatedly, on an ongoing basis, for as long as the “medical experts” deem necessary.

Here are just a few examples of their handiwork …

In Norway, 23 elderly people died after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. However, according to Reuters’ “fact-checkers,” it turns out, old people just die sometimes, especially in nursing homes, from a variety of causes … unless they haven’t been vaccinated, in which case they definitely died of Covid, regardless of what they actually died of. For example, a 99-year-old man suffering from dementia and emphysema, who tested negative for the virus three times, was added to the “Covid deaths” figures because a nursing home doctor “assumed” it was Covid (which GloboCap has expressly instructed him to do).

In Germany, 13 of 40 residents of one nursing home died after being vaccinated, but this was just a “tragic coincidence,” which had absolutely nothing to do with the vaccine.

In Spain, in another “tragic coincidence,” 46 nursing home residents who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine died within the course of one month. A further 28 of the 94 residents and 12 staff members subsequently tested positive.

In Florida, a healthy middle-aged doctor died from an unusual blood disorder two weeks after receiving the vaccine, but, according to the experts, the sudden onset of this rare immunological blood disorder (i.e., immune thrombocytopenia) “should not be interpreted as linked to the vaccine,” and was probably just a total coincidence.

In California, a 60-year-old X-ray technologist received a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A few hours later he had trouble breathing. He was hospitalized and died four days later. His widow says she’s not ready at this point to link her husband’s death to the vaccine. “I’m not putting any blame on Pfizer,” she said, “or on any other pharmaceutical company.” So, probably just another coincidence.

A 78-year-old woman in California died immediately after being vaccinated, but her death was not related to the vaccine, health officials assured the public. “(She) received an injection of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer around noon. While seated in the observation area after the injection, [she] complained of feeling discomfort and while being evaluated by medical personnel she lost consciousness.” Despite the sudden death of his wife, her husband intends to receive a second dose.

A former Detroit news anchor died just one day after receiving the vaccine, but it was probably just a coincidental stroke, which the “normal side effects of the vaccine may have masked.”

Also in Michigan, a 90-year-old man died the day after receiving the vaccine, but, again, this was just a tragic coincidence. As Dr. David Gorski explained, “the baseline death rate of 90-year-olds is high because they’re 90 years old,” which makes perfect sense … unless, of course, they died of Covid, in which case their age and underlying conditions make absolutely no difference whatsoever.

In Kentucky, two nuns at a monastery died, and more than two dozen others tested positive, in a sudden “Covid-19 outbreak” that began two days after the nuns were vaccinated. The monastery had been completely closed to visitors and Covid-free up to that point, but the nuns were old and had “health issues,” and so on.

In Virginia, a 58-year-old grandmother died within hours after receiving the vaccine, but, as Facebook’s “fact checkers” prominently pointed out, it had to be just another coincidence, because the “vaccines have been tested for safety extensively.”

And then there are all the people on Facebook sharing their stories of loved ones who have died shortly after receiving the Covid vaccine, who the Facebook “fact checkers” are doing their utmost to discredit with their official-looking “fact-check notices.” For example …

OK, I realize it’s uncomfortable to have to face things like that (i.e., global corporations like Facebook implying that these people are lying or are using the sudden deaths of their loved ones to discourage others from getting vaccinated), especially if you’re just trying to follow orders and parrot official propaganda … even the most fanatical Covidian Cultists probably still have a shred of human empathy buried deep in their cold little hearts. But there’s an information war on, folks! You’re either with the Corporatocracy or against it! This is no time to get squeamish, or, you know, publicly exhibit an ounce of compassion. What would your friends and colleagues think of you?!

No, report these anti-vaxxers to the authorities, shout them down on social media, switch off your critical-thinking faculties, and get in line to get your vaccination! The fate of the human species depends on it! And, if you’re lucky, maybe GloboCap will even give you one of these nifty numerical Covid-vaccine tattoos for free!

The post The Vaccine (Dis)Information War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

Category: Social media

Second class citizens

“Outraged”

Claimants speak

Systemic problems