Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

It is a truth increasingly, if not universally, acknowledged that the Democratic Party hates democracy .In fact, it absolutely loathes democracy. Its refusal to schedule any presidential primary debates is bad enough. But it's now reached the point where that most sacrosanct pillar of liberalism - the First Amendment to the US Constitution - has been rendered anathema to the experts of the liberal class.

Why? Because a trio of federal appellate court judges has ruled that the Biden administration overstepped its bounds in pressuring the social media giants of Silicon Valley to censor content  Since the lawsuit was brought by a couple of Republican states' attorneys from Missouri and Louisiana, it is dismissively described by the New York Times as a "victory for conservatives." It is not only not something to be celebrated by liberals, this upholding of speech rights is something to be chagrined about. The immediate implication in the Times article is that if Republicans support a good thing, it is automatically demoted to a bad thing, or at least a thing that is highly suspect.

Democratic critics of the court ruling say that the Biden administration and its adjacent federal bureau of investigation were only trying to suppress information about the Covid pandemic that was not based upon scientific fact. These posts contained unsanctioned discourse about vaccines, masks, medication and lockdowns which the government deemed to be false and dangerous.

It's being sold as a battle between (noble) Sanctioned Information and (malign) Unsanctioned information. But at its heart it is the class war between unfettered capitalism and any freelance discourse that threatens the profits of unfettered capitalism.

The legal skirmish is even more specifically between and among the infinite varieties of snake oil. Truth or falsity is not the issue. The issue is who gets to control the production of the snake oil.

The Ivermectin treatment for Covid, for example, may or may not be bogus. It may or may not be efficacious.  That controversy is beyond my expertise and purview - and anyway, it is not the point. The point is that alternative medicine, particularly of the unpatented or patent-expired kind, might endanger the profits of Big Pharma.

Snake oil salesmen have always been an integral part of the American landscape. Plenty of people have died over the years and the centuries by relying on the little liver pills advertised in what used to be a wealth of periodicals in this country, the magnetic gizmos to cure disease and the Goop and the blood plasma transfusions for eternal youth. And of course, there's the old standby of simply praying away whatever ails people. Nobody ever said that free speech and religious cults had to be perfectly reasonable, sane or beneficent. Bullshit has always been baked into this human-inhabited planet of ours.

Not for nothing is the Times article on the First Amendment ruling written by a reporter who works on the "Misinformation Desk."  Whether this new beat is a warning that the Times itself is misinforming you is left unsaid. But Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Lee Myers immediately sets the desired snake oil tone, albeit one with the requisite gravitas. He is qualified to write about misinformation, insinuates a blurb appended to his article, because he once wrote a whole book about Putin. His misinformation expertise spans the entire globe, as a matter of fact.

So right off the bat,  it is incumbent to describe the First Amendment ruling as purely a Republican thing. That the liberal ACLU crowd also approves the Appellate decision only gets a brief mention several paragraphs in - only once readers already have been triggered to despise it.  Myers finally also allows that "others" besides Republicans also are not okay with government censorship. But as an example of this outlying otherness opposed to government censorship, he gives us Robert F Kennedy Jr, -  who, besides defending the First Amendment, is also described as an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.

How do you know that journalism in the public interest has gone the way of the rotary phone? When the Paper of Record sees fit to replace its Climate Desk with a Misinformation Desk

Misinformation is a fluid word, interchangeable with Disinformation and the even more dreaded Malinformation.  It can be defined as any information, whether it be true, false or in-between, that does not pass the smell test of the delicate upturned noses of the Established Order. Information must always be disbursed from on high and never from the ground up. Brains must be well-credentialed, preferably from the Ivy League and well-funded think tanks. That is why the Times and other corporate media outlets will never, ever admit that their own Russiagate narrative was and is a huge hoax, born fully formed of the 2016 electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. That is why the Paper of Record's own current disinformation campaign is insisting that the millions of premature deaths and the lifelong disabilities from Covid 19 are just like the seasonal flu. If their cherry-picked "experts" are unconcerned about the latest surge of new strains, then neither should you be. Cases are mild, especially if you're a celebrity with concierge health care and live-in help. Any information to the contrary makes you a mere personal anecdote-spreader. If some vulnerable people are "falling by the wayside," in the unfortunate euphemistic words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, that's just the way the eugenics cookie crumbles.

The First Amendment has been tacitly amended, you see. It may not be invoked by the lower orders or by other renegades or heretics or irresponsible people, especially those belonging to the wrong political party or refusing to join any political party at all. The only safe snake oil is the kind that is well-dressed, smells heavenly, and is bottled in expensive crystal decanters. Ir is usually only accessible to, and accepted by, those with the disposable incomes with which to unlock a Times paywall or to afford a cable subscription.

The Times article on the court ruling, what with its Pulitzer stamp of approval, therefore fairly reeks of class snobbery, as do most of the subscriber responses to it. Not only was the legal decision upholding the First Amendment rendered in the deep South (New Orleans) it was rendered by a mere three judges. The backwardness of the thing is a given.

Although the First Amendment says nothing specific about an inherent human right to free speech, and only bars the government from policing speech, the Times is having none of it. It actually euphemizes the ongoing censorship efforts as "the government's ability to combat false and misleading narratives about the pandemic, voting rights and other issues that spread on social media."

That sentence broadcasts sloppy lazy thinking and/or deliberate, misdirecting vagueness. The conflation of the various conflicting theories and studies about a misunderstood series of diseases caused by Covid with easily debunked lies about polling places and election dates is ridiculous on its face. And even if you think it's ridiculous, then you are urged to take the next suggested step and get all freaked out about all the unnamed "other issues" that spread like deadly pathogens all over the Internet!

The  newspaper does not, of course, directly critique the Biden White House, the FBI, the Surgeon General or the Centers For Disease Control for their own mal-informative actions, such as as precipitously and falsely declaring the pandemic to be over. It certainly has not examined or retracted its own mal-informative reporting about the contrived and debunked Russiagate narrative with which it explains the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the rise of Trump and Trumpism. You see, the snake oil being dispensed from the crystal vials of capitalistic media has been fully tested and approved. It atomizes the doses into a fine mist, keeping you alternately anesthetized and coked up with partisan rage. It aims to choke people into a state of atomized, isolated helplessness.

In its official response to the Appellate Court, the White House doubled down, tripled down, infinity-downed and sprayed its own snake oil with toxic abandon: 

“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the White House said in a statement. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people but make independent choices about the information they present.”

Of course, congress could pass a law reversing the protections that social media behemoths currently enjoy from libel or slander suits brought by injured parties. But that might damage the government's self-assigned role as censorship police.

Whatever happened to the idea that the best weapon against bad speech is better speech? The government and the ruling class it serves, however, find it more expedient to counter what they deem to be bad speech with lies and disinformation that suits their own agenda and serves their own needs. If they spritz out their nostrums often enough, the hope is that the body politic will have no other recourse but to helplessly absorb them by osmosis, making them integral parts of their being. 

The Audacity of Obama's Opacity

Longtime readers of this blog might remember my semi-regular series deconstructing Barack Obama's weekly White House addresses. His tones were so dulcet, his words were so anodyne that it was easy to be lulled into a state of complacency, if not rank stupefaction. Only when you gave the transcripts a close read were you able to suss out the occult message. Many if not most of these addresses were dog whistles to Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex.

A common theme throughout his reign of Endless Austerity and Permawar was Support the Troops. The gaslighting propaganda got especially heavy during the winter holiday season, when year after year after year, Obama actually compared the sacrifices and hardships of endlessly deployed troops to Jesus Christ being born just to suffer and die for our sins in order to save us.

For me, one of the saddest things about Trump and then Biden succeeding Obama to the presidency was that the weekly presidential speeches went bye-bye. Deconstructing Trump's tweets became the fulltime job of #Resistance, Inc., a/k/a the establishment media, who endlessly debated the real meaning of Covfefe. And what can you possibly deconstruct about Biden, who wears his sociopathy on his sleeve and whose definition of a major press conference is sitting for a softball interview on MSNBC?

So when I heard that Obama had recorded an address last week to the Columbia University School of Journalism to mark the 30th anniversary of the U,N.'s Global Press Freedom extravaganza, I wondered how he'd square his remarks with all the scathing criticism he'd gotten from the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications.. The CJR called his administration the most opaque, secretive and anti-free press in modern history.

Just back from Spain, where he'd traveled on his pal Steven Spielberg's private jet to catch a concert by their mutual pal Bruce Springsteen, Obama's  remarks, ostensibly geared  to journalism students, were really directed at his squeamish pals in the Military-Industrial complex (MIC), of which Wall Street and establishment media are such integral parts.

But it was a dog whistle in a higher key this time. Thanks  to reporting by The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein, we find out that the MIC acronym has been enhanced into FMIC. I am sad to say that it does not stand for  F-k the Military Industrial Complex. It stands for the  Foreign Malign Influence Center, a shadowy new-ish government agency which oversees propaganda efforts by the Pentagon, the State Department, the intelligence agencies, and the law enforcement agencies. It's a one-stop shop for countering "foreign disinformation." with acceptable domestic government propaganda:

The FMIC is authorized to counter foreign disinformation targeting not just U.S. elections, but also “the public opinion within the United States.

This hiding-in-plain sight government agency is the direct offshoot of the State Department's Global Engagement Center, which Obama himself established by executive order during his last year in office.  The GEC essentially made it perfectly legal for the government to propagandize US citizens. As Klppenstein reveals, the FMIC both centralizes the propaganda efforts and it expands them from State through the full panoply of US surveillance and police agencies, whose previous efforts at propaganda were deemed too disjointed to be effective.

Klipenstein writes,

That foreign governments such as Russia spread lies as part of propaganda to advance their own interests is not in dispute. But the efforts to counter disinformation have now become a cottage industry that critics suggest has grown far out of proportion to the threat.

Therefore, with the scattershot government response to the Janaury 6th capitol riot as the excuse for the latest "state of exception," the new and improved government propaganda shop will  not only counter "foreign" disinformation, it will counter it with a unified proactive Narrative of its own. As long as they can cast all manner of homegrown ills as the product of a foreign bad actor, they can fight Disinformation Over Here so they don't have to fight it Over There. 

And this is where Obama comes in, to lecture the future elite journalistic partners of the EMIC -  students who now pay (or will owe)  about $75,000 a year in Columbia tuition in order to to  become credentialed enough to Disseminate the Discourse in the ever-dwindling collection of news outlets.

Some salient snippets from the Obama video:

"We have to look at ourselves critically and make reforms that allow us not only to survive but thrive."

Obama carefully doesn't specify who the "we" are or what kind of "reforms" he has in mind. Whenever a politician uses the word reform, it usually means something that's good for the rich, and bad for everyone else. They never talk about cutting Social Security and other programs, but only about reforming them. In other words, deforming them. So when Obama talks about reforming journalism, I'm afraid that he's talking about censorship.

"It feels like we're at an inflection point - rising inequality, deepening polarization, and widespread disinformation. (and technical trends like AI). We need to face these trends head-om on, and we need you (his emphasis)to do it."

Because politicians like Obama have failed to face these long-standing, capitalism-engendered problems - which in his world are only trends - the rest of the world is going to shit. You don't need no stinking jobs. All you need is information approved from on high. Only propaganda will set you free.

"That's why it's so important to find creative ways to reinvigorate quality journalism."

If it's quality journalism already, then what's to reinvigorate? He seems to be suggesting new adjectives to make misery look like more fun, or at least entertaining enough to keep the proles glued to the screen in order prevent them from taking to the streets.

"I plan on shining a light on the biggest challenges. That includes revitalizing our political institutions, and coming up with more inclusive and sustainable models of capitalism and creating a stronger democratic (Democratic?) culture. And it also means creating an information environment that reinforces rather than erodes our democracy."

Here we go again with the neoliberal interchangeability between capitalism and democracy. The neoliberal project is fraying around the edges, coming apart at the seams and developing unsightly stains. So the purpose of Reform Journalism is to mend capitalism, add some frills, take it to the dry-cleaners, add some fabric softener,  co-opt the latest outgroup to model it and appear in commercials, expand the identity politics marketplace, and set the acceptable culture narrative.

"One in which we're able to tell a common (emphasis his) story and not just a bunch of separate stories.... These are areas where we have to do better so our democracy stays strong."

Just what we need... one approved story, condensed and toned down to prevent any unseemly outbreaks of independent thought.

"It seems that the only way to get attention is to engage in the kind of opinion journalism that gets people angry, riled up or revengeful. or just creates controversy and gets attention."

 The Columbia School of Journalism offers a course in opinion writing, so somebody had better alert Obama. It simply will not do for any latter-day Ida Tarbells, Lincoln Steffens or Molly Ivenses to get people riled up and mad about dirty politics and racial and social injustice. Everybody just relax. Controversy and dissent in the lower orders are anathema to the tsunami of capitalism which we only imagine is tossing us about before drowning us. Thrill instead to Obama's honeyed tones. Lay back as the golden beneficent drops of government propaganda trickle down upon you. 

The Political Con Goes On

A stew of scandals is bubbling over in the White House. But you'd never know it from the New York Times's Strangelovian leading headline today: "How Democrats Learned to Cast Aside Reservations and Embrace Biden '24."

As far as the Paper of Record is concerned, the shocking admission by a former CIA acting director that Secretary of State Antony Blinken (while a top Biden campaign operative) had solicited a letter with 51 intelligence bigwig signatories that falsely ascribed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal to "Russian disinformation" is not worthy of coverage.

 Ditto for the  high-level IRS official seeking whistleblower protection for information implicating Attorney General Merrick Garland himself in stalling or outright quashing criminal charges against Hunter Biden for evading millions in taxes for money earned on murky foreign business deals.

This same Attorney General, meanwhile, is busily prosecuting a Black socialist group and its elderly leaders. Their alleged crime? They criticized the Ukraine proxy war and they accepted, at most, a few thousand dollars from Russian donors for their charity work. It is now apparently a crime to exercise one's First Amendment rights if the government has deemed them "weaponized."  This story, too, is being studiously ignored by the Times and other establishment media outlets. 

So is a letter by a ranking House Democrat to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, threatening him with prison for the "crime" of conflating two security state acronyms in a Tweet - not, mind you, in his actual congressional testimony regarding government censorship of social media.

 As far as the Gray Lady is concerned, the big story this week is Joe Biden's upcoming re-election announcement. We're told that the only thing that should concern us about Joe Biden is his advanced age. He'd be 86 by the end of his second term. 

Despite what the Times generously euphemizes as his "middling approval ratings," the article makes clear that the only concerned voices that really count are those of the ruling political, donor and consultant classes. The public, as ever, be damned.

Democrats yearn for a fresh face in 2024, according to repeated polls, they just don’t know who that would be.

After Democrats won more races than expected in the 2022 midterm elections, any energy to challenge Mr. Biden quickly dissipated. The left has stayed in line even as Mr. Biden has lately made more explicit appeals toward the center. And would-be rivals have stayed on the sidelines.

Was there ever a more damning assessment of a political party? A more cowed, complacent and corrupt bunch of people has probably never existed. And by "party" I very much mean the de facto Uniparty, of which the Dems are the willfully weaker wing. The only thing that these increasingly authoritarian liberals can do is flap their gerontocratic gums. 

And that goes for the young "progressives" in the mix as well. Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York feebly groused to the paper that it's "almost as if" Biden is pandering to GOP talking points, what with his recent harsh actions on immigration, veto of criminal justice reform in Washington, DC,  and allowing oil-drilling on federal lands. But if there's one thing that Biden is good at, it's maintaining the owning classes in the lifestyles to which they're accustomed. So what, therefore, if tens of millions of people are losing health care, food assistance and the very roofs over their heads? Bowman tells the Times and its readers exactly what they want to hear: what really matters is "stability." 

Haven't you heard? "Status Quo with Uncle Joe!" is the new Medicare For All. The insane march to World War III by a cabal of mediocre politicians is Stability You Can Believe In. Let's face it. Sudden relief from everyday misery and chaos would be too much of a shock to the system. 

Now, you might possibly be worried that this group bear-hug from Dems might end up literally cracking Joe Biden's aged spine. But the point is not his aging body or his deteriorating mind. He is as expendable as anyone. The presidency is a group effort. He is just a figurehead or a front-man.

Thanks to the Trump menace, the presidential bar is not only set too low, it's at a subterranean level if it still exists at all. The current White House occupant doesn't hold domestic press conferences any more and nobody even bats an eye.  Even when he did honor this archaic tradition of public accountability, he did so with pre-selected reporters and cue cards supplied by his handlers. Biden has admitted on more than one occasion that "they" have warned him not to talk about this or that.

Therefore, his re-election announcement will be a "low-key" pre-recorded, scripted video.

Philip K. Dick forecast the Biden presidency style way back in the 60s in his futuristic novel The Simulacra. In the book as in reality, there is only one 21st century political party, and it's called the Democratic Republican Party. 

In the scene introducing Dick's futuristic White House, President Kalbfleisch (tr. Veal) has just been delivering televised remarks to the citizens of the United States of Europe and America, warning them of a fascist presidential rival. Noticing a slight slowing of the presidential performance, the lead handler gives the order to "shut if off."

"The Kalbfleisch simulacrum stopped. Its arms stuck out, rigid in their final gesture, the withered face vacuous. The simulacrum said nothing and automatically the TV cameras also shut off, one by one: there was no longer anything for them to transmit and the technicians behind them, all of them Ges (elites with top secret clearance) knew it."

 

The simulacrum techs congratulate themselves on the president's speech. satisfied that its fear-mongering purpose and its promise of "stability" had resonated with the public. This is despite somewhat regretting they'd nixed a comparison of the Trump-like rival to Hitler. After all, they say, "51 percent of the population would like to see another Hitler."

One of the techs then walks up to the president, "touching it gingerly on the shoulder, as if expecting it, prodded, to resume its activity. It did not."

Simulacra come and go, but the ruling elite who manufacture and maintain them remain more or less the same in the historical grand scheme of things. Maybe next time around, they can build a fresher-faced simulacrum, just as they so successfully did with Barack Obama. The least that they can do, absent a fresh face, is to manufacture a more coherent actor, much like twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan in his mostly asymptomatic first term.

The Rise of the Censorship-Industrial Complex

Since the First Amendment outlaws censorship by the U.S. government, our modern censors can't actually call themselves censors. They prefer to be known as "disinformation" specialists, whose mission is to "disrupt" any narratives and opinions that they don't like. They are particularly averse to criticism of their proxy war in Ukraine.

They operate under many different names and they get their funding from many different sources: various government agencies, the public-private war machine known as NATO, philanthropies, academia, and  corporations. Whenever the professional disinformation warriors inevitably get exposed as the blatant and often clumsy censors that they are, they retreat for about a minute before regenerating themselves under a new foundation, a new consortium, a new think tank. 

Last spring, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was forced to abandon its "Disinformation Governance Board" when it was called out as Orwellian by various civil liberties groups.

A couple of weeks ago, journalist Matt Taibbi exposed the German Marshall Fund's  "Hamilton68 Dashboard" as a Twitter-FBI partnership of a scam fed to a complicit establishment media in order to further the equally fraudulent "Russiagate" narrative. It turned out that hundreds of Twitter accounts flagged as belonging to Kremlin bots mostly belonged to innocent people.

 A couple of days ago, the government finances behind an outfit called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) were revealed by columnist Jonathan Turley. With GDI's publication of the top ten allegedly most dangerous news sites, the State Department hastily cut off its own illegal funding - even though the GDI had tried to make a cute end-run around the First Amendment by declaring itself to be based in Great Britain, which doesn't have the same press freedoms as America supposedly does.

What the top ten most dangerous sites all have in common is that they are right-leaning, and they have been critical of the war in Ukraine. What the top ten "least dangerous" sites listed by GDI have in common is that they are generally liberal, and they have been non-critical of the war in Ukraine. Many of them, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and HuffPo, had  also helped to amplify the Russiagate narrative in the years since Donald Trump took office. (Buzzfeed also had the unique distinction of being the first "safe" outlet to publish the fictional Steele Report, linking Trump to the Kremlin). The safe sites were also users of the discredited Hamilton 68 Dashboard. Their ongoing anti-Russia narratives not only served to generate and amplify the Trump hatred, it helped glean Democratic voters' support for the CIA, the FBI, and the US proxy war in Ukraine.

The GDI website comes right out and admits that its idea of "disinformation" includes any critical discussion of the US-fomented 2014 Ukraine coup and the US's role in instigating Putin's invasion last year: 

GDI has observed a number of ad tech companies monetising anti-Ukrainian and anti-democratic disinformation.

This deck includes examples of ad-funded stories promoting a range of harmful adversarial narratives: ● Western aggression: Under President Biden’s watch the U.S. has instigated a war with Russia. There was an anti-constitutional coup d'etat in 2014 in which Western-backed extremists overthrew the democratically elected government. ● NATO bioweapons threat: The U.S. and other NATO allies have military biological projects in Ukraine. ● Legitimate intervention: At the request of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the Russian Federation started a ‘special operation’ to protect them. These disinformation narratives have been identified across multiple websites in multiple languages.

GDI practices its "name and shame" censorship by putting pressure not only on the tech platforms which publish ads next to the antiwar discourse, but also on the corporations paying for the ads. They aim to squelch dissent by cutting off the financial wherewithal to publish it.

As an example of this indirect censorship, GDI posted a screenshot of a Zero Hedge article which lambasted Joe Biden's goading of Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine. It named and it shamed Best Buy, Acer and other corporations for funding this "disinformation." It also prominently circled in red an ad for Harvard Medical School that was placed next to the antiwar piece.

GDI is careful not to accuse its media antagonists of actually lying about the coup, the war and about other topics. It's not so crass as to label critics disloyal or un-American. Instead, it defines the "disinformation" that it fights as the use of "adversarial language." It does not at all subscribe to the traditional notion that journalism is supposed to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." 

To hear them tell it, the security/war state is the afflicted one. Because they are just not comfortable with free speech.

Journalism, according to these current and former "intelligence community" apparatchiks, should strive to protect "institutions" and "established wisdom," as well as protecting such vulnerable groups as trafficked children and immigrants. Adversarial reporting - no matter whether those attacked are the powerful or the powerless -  can only sow divisions in society and cause the sort of "harm" that they never quite get around to specifying, but which can lead to "violence, illness and death."

The censors identify the following categories of potential victims that writers must avoid annoying or attacking, either implicitly or explicitly.

 ■ at-risk individuals or groups ■ current scientific consensus ■ democracy and key institutions ○ Most importantly, these adversarial narratives create a risk of harm. ● This definition transcends false binaries and identifies disinformation explicitly by adversarial narrative topic, such as anti-immigrant, misogyny, anti-vaccination, etc.

It's hard to overstate this essential insanity: the censors actually conflate genuinely at-risk individuals and groups with the very same powerful institutions that put people at such risk in the first place, with their wars and their savaging of domestic social contracts. GDI and its spider web of a cohort represent and protect themselves through the coercion and oppression of their own victims - and now, their media critics. It's a classic case of Freudian projection. The Disinformation Police are themselves the prime purveyors of disinformation.

And First Amendment be damned, because the killing of critique and dissent is a global enterprise, and other countries do, or at least they should, have censorship laws on the books to keep the masses in order and render free-speakers mute.

On the GDI to-do list:

GDI calls for effective policy enforcement This enforcement should prioritise the following areas at an EU and global level: ● Risk assessments: Guaranteeing that all systemic risks (e.g. disinformation, election manipulation, harms to minors online etc.) are catalogued by the Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs), rather than only the most prominent, recurrent risks. ● Data access: Ensuring civil society has access to relevant and timely platform data in order to provide third party scrutiny. ● Oversight: In the case of the Digital Services Act, establishing a multistakeholder advisory group to oversee implementation, with experts drawn from civil society. ● Effectiveness: Adversarial narrative framing of disinformation should be included within regulatory regimes to tackle the scope of harmful content. An urgent, long-term and industry-wide solution is needed to end the monetisation of harmful disinformation.

And to be effective, censorship and the murder of independent thought (not to mention the destruction of creative joy) has to start early, as soon as children learn how to read. They first have to be shielded by the censorship-sympatico Inclusivity Squad from harmful divisive words like "fat" and "ugly," which the late author Roald Dahl used to describe his lovably hideous fictional characters.

All I can say is, if the Speech Cops can stoop so low as to mangle a dead writer's words, then so can I! Apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (or should I say Slenderperson?)

Thou, too, sail on, O Censorship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!is th the majority of disinformation on the web is motivated by financial gain, the result of the dominat attention-driven business models that drive today’s intern

The Sinkable Crew of the Good Ship Global Disinformation

Let 'Er R.I.P.

 The Biden administration on Monday ceded what little public health authority that it had still chosen to wield to a Trump judicial appointee - and a grossly unqualified appointee at that. The White House couldn't even wait until the ink was dry on her decision or before airline passengers had safely landed on the ground before declaring that mandatory masking in mass transport was at an end.

Pilots hastened to congratulate their passengers at 35,000 feet for finally achieving their long-sought freedom to spread their germs to the vulnerable person or the unvaccinated baby sitting next to them. Death and taxes may be inevitable - especially on Tax Day Monday - but masks shall never be!

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki bluntly announced that the TSA (Transportation Security Agency) would ignore the pre-existing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) order to continue the mandate at least until next month. This is despite a 47 percent increase in new Covid cases nationwide reported in the last week. (The increase is likely a gross understatement, given that the government no longer tests, tracks or even treats Covid patients, especially when they are poor and uninsured.)

The beleaguered TSA at long last will be able to return to its core mission: groping and scanning passengers for the prevention of in-flight terrorism, and checking their shoes for bombs and ammo.

Meanwhile, to enhance the magical thinking magic of the No More Masks Day decision, the Easter Bunny himself crashed Psaki's press briefing, fresh from his rolling exercise on the White House Lawn. The fairy tale actually had begun quite early in the day, when Bunny prevented Biden from talking to the assembled media with just one swipe of his big furry paw.

Just when you thought the day couldn't get any more phantasmagorical, Senator Elizabeth Warren mendaciously announced in a New York Times op-ed that "Democrats are the party of working people."

But clinging tenaciously to a vestige of reality nevertheless, Warren did quickly admit that her lead sentence was just more of the same old gaslighting rhetoric:

Ahead of the 2020 election, we advanced ideas and plans that we believed would, in ways big and small, make our democracy and our economy work better for all Americans. Across this country, voters agreed with us — and gave us a majority in Washington so that we could deliver on those promises.

Oopsies! 

Warren then proceeds to follow the same old Democratic recipe: blame the Republicans, blame the Republicans and then blame the Republicans some more. But if they are to prevent a bloodbath in the November midterms, Dems have to go beyond better messaging. They have to work overtime to "convince voters that we can deliver meaningful change" in other ways than simply bashing Republicans (not to mention  beating them at their own nihilistic game by allowing a hack Trump judge to make public health policy.)

Deliverance, virtue-signaling Democratic-style, versus deliverance backwoods Dickey novel Republican-style, in Warren's world would entail abolishing the filibuster and thereby forcing the inbred congress-critters to vote in full public view - as if bellowing out ignorance and hatred in public is not a good and positive thing for their own electoral prospects.

Oh, and the corruption! Warren does deserve a little credit for taking a baby bunny-sized swipe at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her vast enrichment courtesy of decades of insider trading. But Warren is also careful not to mention Pelosi by her actual name. And she is also careful to mildly suggest that Biden cancel some student debt by executive order. However, in narrowly framing her proposal in identity politics, around the benefits that would  accrue to women and racial groups rather than to all debtors of all classes, genders and ethnicities, she passive-aggressively instigates more of the same divide-and-conquer culture war resentments that she just accused the Republicans of fomenting.

She uttered not one word in favor of this country's burgeoning bottom-up labor movement and Amazon unionization when she criticized Jeff Bezos and Amazon. For someone who claims that the Democrats are "the party of working people," her emphasis on simply taxing billionaires and corporations - without a parallel call to then redistribute the wealth by way of public benefits, such as guaranteed free universal health care for all people - falls flat. 

She supplements her strict, party-line casting of blame for all manner of domestic misery on the GOP and Putin and the interruption of the supply chain with a brief nod to the "political consultant class" and its messaging trope as a substitute for concrete action. She has not a word to say about Biden's recent order allowing more oil and gas drilling on public lands.

It is certainly no accident that besides the Times giving Elizabeth Warren column space, its resident pundit Maureen Dowd did her part over the weekend by taking the  previously maligned Bernie Sanders out of mothballs and freshening up his wispy white fur for purposes of sheep-dogging more disgruntled voters to Get Out There and Vote for Democrats in November to forestall the umpteenth apocalypse. As far as I know, Maureen Dowd is not related to the delusional Elwood Dowd, played by Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, which is the name of his jumbo invisible rabbit friend. Feel the Bern, believe in the Bern and vote for the corporate Dems! Hear it often enough, and you, just like Elwood's friends and family, will also start to believe in imaginary bunnies, especially the genuine ones wearing oversized mittens.

 Never mind that the Democrats themselves are courting Armageddon with a vengeance, cheerleading the US proxy war against Russia, a nuclear power. Democratic Senator Chris Coons was just the latest hack to call for US troops on the ground in Ukraine when he appeared on a weapons manufacturer-sponsored "news"  show  on Easter Sunday.

But back to the New York Times. The controlling Sulzbergers just named Joseph F. Kahn to replace executive editor Dean Baquet, who is being forced to step down at the age of 65 solely because of family "tradition." 

The new chief's biography reads like a parody of the elite meritocracy: Harvard-educated scion of a big box store empire, brief stint at the Dallas Morning News before becoming bored by "local" news and deciding to return to Harvard and "pivot to China," as an independently funded student and journalist, a series of quick professional promotions, marriage to a former World Bank official.

From the Times puff piece announcing Kahn's appointment:

After returning to New York in 2008 as an editor, Mr. Kahn helped launch The Times’s Chinese-language website in 2011, a multimillion-dollar investment at a time of financial scarcity for the company. About six months later, Mr. Kahn was part of the team of editors who decided to publish an investigation into the hidden wealth of China’s ruling class, over the strident objections of the Chinese government....

Mr. Kahn will be taking charge of The Times when many Americans distrust mainstream sources of news, and disinformation tactics are growing increasingly sophisticated. In the interview, he acknowledged that his experience with Chinese officials, well versed in propaganda and deception, was newly relevant.

“I would not have thought,” Mr. Kahn said, “that being a foreign correspondent in China would be good preparation to be executive editor of The New York Times in 2022.”

I don't know whether to interpret that statement as Kahn championing freedom of the press in a repressive regime, or Kahn bragging that he learned censorship techniques from the best of the best.

Judging from the Paper of Record's ongoing devotion to quoting unnamed senior officials promoting US wars of hegemony, with little to no outside dissent, I would have to guess the latter. That the war is drowning out pandemic news on the front pages and in the lead stories of virtually all corporate media in the United States, I would definitely have to guess the latter.

Not that Covid coverage is not continuing. Star Times economics columnist David Leonhardt, for example, continues to scoff at the faint-hearted and pretends, day after day, that there are no poor or uninsured or chronically sick people living in the Land of the Free. Pay no attention to those "big screaming headlines" announcing that Covid is still very much with us. After all, if 82-year-old Nancy Pelosi gets it and is "just fine," then you will be just fine too.

He doesn't seem to realize that in such a wildly unequal country, there is Elite Covid, and then there is Proletarian Covid for everyone else. Leonhardt actually seems to think that since rich people with unlimited financial and medical resources are able to recover, then so should everybody else, even without paid time off, household help, reliable transportation and a bank balance. His basic metric is that there are fewer hospitalizations for the virus than there were at the start of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines. He conveniently ignores the fact that there are also many fewer hospitals serving poor and rural areas in the United States. But nevertheless, he persists:

Going forward, this newsletter will begin to pay less attention to statistics on coronavirus cases and more attention to statistics on hospitalizations. “Looking at the data in the same way we’ve been accustomed over the past two years can be misleading,” Spencer (a cherry picked epidemiologist) said.

We won’t completely ignore the case numbers, because they still have some relevance. But the cases data has become both less reliable and less meaningful than earlier in the pandemic.

In other words:

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Biden's Manifesto of Death

Chalking up his reckless call for removing Putin from power to a spontaneous moment of righteous outrage, President Biden has quickly pivoted to calling for more disempowerment and oppression of the serfs back here in The Homeland.

His proposed 2023 federal budget is a deadly and belligerent manifesto for more austerity, more war, and a vast enhancement of the domestic police state.

In true Orwellian doublethink fashion, though, the insider-y Politico news site is calling this gruesome document a "peace offering" to Acting President Joe Manchin, senator of West Virginia. Even the usual progressive congress-critters, according to the article, are willing to give Biden "the space to play." For is not the US political establishment itself the Disneyland centerpiece of the hegemonic World Order, a theme park full of bullies, toadies and untold throngs of silent victims?

Biden was happy to revert for just a moment from his role of global warmongering bully as he addressed the media on Monday:

“The first value is fiscal responsibility. The previous administration as you all know, ran record budget deficits. In fact, it went up every year under my predecessor. My administration is turning that around. Last year, we cut the deficit by more than $350 billion. This year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1,300,000,000,000. That would be the largest one-year reduction in the deficit in US history.”

And as the document itself more belligerently puts it, 

 “We are at the beginning of a decisive decade that will determine the future of strategic competition with China, the trajectory of the climate crisis and whether the rules governing technology, trade and international economics enshrine or violate our democratic values.”

Meanwhile, following the cynical tradition of all his Democratic predecessors, Biden also made sure to tack on the usual "balancing" suggestions of modestly taxing billionaires and corporations in order to vaguely protect the environment and fund a very few new, barely adequate programs to address a panoply of domestic social and health catastrophes - funding which is guaranteed to fail in Congress. He is giving the oligarchs who own and run the country everything that they want in the way of amusement. He even took special care to emphasize that "I am a capitalist."

Or, as the New York Times spins it, the poor old reactionary is being forced to bow to"political reality" which, apparently, is the Gray Lady's euphemism for giving oligarchs and corporations everything they want.

To add further insult to the injury of this elitist "reality", Uncle Joe also finds his aged spine so buffeted by those pesky "gale-force headwinds" from the narrow-minority Republican wing of the Uniparty that he and his fellow Democrats sadly will be forced to huddle in their storm cellars without actually doing much about the worsening climate catastrophe that is killing, dispossessing and dispersing poor people from all over the globe. Unfortunately, Biden's "bipartisan unity agenda" will have to take precedence for now. The priority must not be the lives of everyday people, but the political fortunes of a few centrist Democrats in danger of losing their seats next fall.

As veteran Washington reporter Jonathan Weisman writes in his own Times-splainer about the Biden White House's proposed 2023 federal budget,

Its framing was a marked shift from the 2021 pitch for a fundamental transformation of an ailing American society. Instead, Mr. Biden’s plan was an appeal based on the reality of the moment, to both new dangers around the globe and at home, where inflation and crime are crushing the president’s political standing.

Endangered Democrats in swing districts have been urging Mr. Biden to counter the messages from the far left and address the kitchen-table issues facing voters with incremental steps, not transformative legislation. For them, the budget promises deficit reduction to cool the economy and tangible steps to unclog supply-chain bottlenecks that contribute to rising prices.

Of course, Biden's call for deficit reduction is not reflected in his military budget, which includes the largest ever increase in spending, at almost $800 billion - or about $2 billion a day for the relentless waging of global war. Given his recent, reckless provocations of a fellow nuclear power, his demand for a radically increased production of nuclear weapons also comes as no great surprise.

The Times article continues,

Far from defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two popular slogans on the left, the budget robustly funds both. Customs and Border Protection would receive $15.3 billion and ICE $8.1 billion, including $309 million for border security technology — a well-funded effort to stop illegal migration. The nation’s two primary immigration law enforcement agencies would see increases of around 13 percent.

The budget even includes $19 million for border fencing and other infrastructure.

Federal law enforcement would receive $17.4 billion, a jump of nearly 11 percent, or $1.7 billion, over 2021 levels. And the president, acknowledging widespread concerns that are driving Republican attacks against Democrats, vowed to tackle the rise in violent crime.

As Biden himself proclaimedat his budget-unveiling press conference, “The answer is not to defund our police departments. It’s to fund our police and give them all the tools they need… The budget puts more police on the streets for community policing so they get to know the community they are policing.” 

When the Times opened up its article about the proposed budget to reader comments, reaction was sparse (about 50), compared to the 6.3 thousand outraged reactions to the Number One Trending story in America, concerning the Academy Awards "slapgate" controversy.

But, unlike the accolades about the Biden Wish List so dutifully being gushed out by the "progressive" congressional caucus, these 50 reader comments were almost uniformly critical of the Democrats' unabashed right-wing priorities. And not only were further comments soon cut off, within only a few hours, all the published ones were also mysteriously removed from the article. They simply were not in keeping with the usual positive responses from the paper's liberal readership to Joe Biden and his party.

Here is (was) my own published comment:

As outlined in this article, this budget is nothing less than a manifesto of death.

Increased production of nuclear weapons, and what amounts to military funding with no limits actually cancels out the window dressing of climate change amelioration. The US military already is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet and therefore the globe's biggest polluter. If the extra funding for police were earmarked for stringent programs that psychologically evaluate aspiring cops, weeding out the sociopaths with a penchant for power and cruelty, then great. But if the money will be going to more military weaponization of local police forces, and giving precedence to returning vets, a good percentage of whom suffer from PTSD as a result of long deployments in our endless wars, then we can probably look forward to a lot more George Floyds and Breonna Taylors and Eric Garners The increased funding not only should be used for psychological profiling of candidates, but to pay for the higher education of police officers, particularly in the field of social work.

The alleged motivation behind the "centrist" Biden budget, as explained in this article, is to fend off Republican criticism of the Dems allegedly being "soft on crime," increasing the re-election chances of vulnerable incumbents. In other words, the Ds are trying to beat the GOP at their own depraved game. The sound you hear in this proposed budget is not one hand clapping. It's an empire crumbling.

That's Ignotainment

 Long gone are the good old days when deriding corporate news as "infotainment" was all the rage. It seems as though all we have left is the rage, manufactured for our ignotainment by those nefarious twin demons which the liberal elite have dubbed  Misinformation and Disinformation, and what the reactionary "populist" Trump and his plutocratic pals call Fake News.

They are striving mightily to subvert and supplant the twin demons of literary yore, Ignorance and Want. These personified social ills so affected Charles Dickens' Scrooge that he became instantly and permanently Woke. He was so rattled that he not only gave his wage slave Bob Cratchit an instant raise and paid time off, he also guaranteed life-long health care to Tiny Tim. The good feelings and new spirit of solidarity actually threatened to spread all over the land!

Ignorance and Want, from A Christmas Carol

But that story is so yesterday, not to mention restrictively seasonal. It's just a bridge too far for the elites - or when you consider that godzillionaire Jeff Bezos is having a historic landmark bridge dismantled just so that he can free his new mega-yacht from its Rotterdam harbor - a bridge too low for their bloated maniacal egos to squeeze under. Because instead of wanting to destroy the Ignorance and Want of the masses, today's sociopathic capitalists want to create more of it. They are the ones who disseminate Ignorance and keep their audiences Wanting more. The theory is that a constant downhill flow of rage and fear will keep the elites safe in their cocooned mansions, high-rise penthouses and those mega-yachts as the rabble is diverted into fighting it out among themselves. 

The virtue-signaling liberal side of the ruling class would have us believe that they are the enlightened ones, as opposed to those nasty old ignorance-spreading Republicans on Fox News. But this week, Whoopi Goldberg of The View put her foot right in it when, waxing indignant about the censorship in Tennessee (Scopes Trial country!) of Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust (because it portrayed nudity), she remarked in passing that the Holocaust was not about race.

The reaction from her fellow liberals was not so much the faux outrage of gleeful conservatives as it was disappointment that Whoopi Goldberg apparently didn't know that the Nazis had viewed Jews as a separate race. Her point of view was that racism is purely a matter of skin color. She doubled down on her stance when she crossed over from her ABC-Disney platform to the CBS wing of the media conglomerate to offer a non-apology apology on the Stephen Colbert show. She was mostly sorry that people had misunderstood her. She was very hurt. Whereupon ABC-Disney slapped her with a two-week suspension, ostensibly so that Goldberg can ponder and learn.

I think the real purpose of her banishment is so that this whole brouhaha can be swept under the rug. Because by the time two weeks are up, we'll be on to the next thing to get mad about. Maybe it'll be Biden declaring war on Russia. Maybe it'll be more has-been musicians yanking their music off Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan. Maybe it'll be another weather disaster spawned by capitalism. I doubt that the news, whether manufactured or whether completely real or natural, will be designed for fomenting good will or heaven forbid, erudition.

While most people, including me, think that Goldberg's temporary banishment is reactionary overkill, her bosses and defenders are as ignorant - or acting like they're as ignorant - as Whoopi. I haven't read or heard one single bit of commentary this week about Hitler's anti-Jewish 1935 Nuremberg Laws being at least partially inspired by the racist Jim Crow laws against Black people then in effect. So to start her ignorance rehab, I'd recommend that Whoopi Goldberg pick up James Q, Whitman's "Hitler's American Model: the United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law." That way, she might be able to have her cake and eat it too.

To be fair, few to none of us were ever taught about the connection between Jim Crow and Nazism in our American history books  This kind of fact-based information does, after all,  kind of make the United States, that great defender of global democracy and human rights, look like a hypocrite. This is especially so given that the Official Narrative now doesn't have fascism rearing its ugly head in the Homeland until Donald Trump was elected.

Lest you worry that low- and middle-brow Ignotainment, as practiced on The View and other cable talkfests posing as news channels, is failing abysmally at its censorious battle against Misinformation and Disinformation and Fake News, let me assure you that the more elite organs like the New York Times are still wheezing away with a  vengeance on their own Mighty Wurlitzers. 

They have a technique that is so passive-aggressive and sneaky that they can never be banished or canceled for any reason. They disseminate lies by wrapping them in layers of contradictions surrounded by ghostly anonymous CIA and Pentagon officials enveloped in disclaimers smothered by double talk. By the time the lies are exposed, if they ever are, they will be forgotten or forgiven.

This nefarious elite propaganda technique might be explained by a concept known as Ignotum Per Ignotius. It means that any given Unknown can only be explained by something that is even more Unknown. In other words, it is so annoyingly obscure, and so uninformative on its face, that if you don't understand it, then you are probably an ignoramus who should just go back to consuming ignotainment.

A perfect example of the deliberately muddy and convoluted Ignotum Per Ignotus technique can be found on the front page headline of Thursday's edition of the Times: "U.S. Exposes What It Says Is Russia's Effort To Fabricate Pretext For Invasion."

This is a pretty clumsy word salad. For one thing, a hunk of real estate being granted the power to speak should set your bullshit detector careening toward the danger zone.

But wait, it gets so much better that it devolves into ignotaining despite itself. For it seems that the Russians are planning to make a fake video wrapped in a disinformation campaign, and that the United Statesians are hoping to spoil it by alerting everybody now. The dastardly plan includes Russians collecting a whole bunch of dead bodies, strewing the corpses  across the countryside after blowing them up, hiring live actors and military props and filming the whole grisly tableau so that the Russians can then accuse Ukraine of committing genocide against Russian-speaking people. It's Wag the Dog, but without the comedy.

Now that its readers have been duly horrified, the Times inserts the usual butt-covering disclaimers:

Officials would not release any direct evidence of the Russian plan or specify how they learned of it, saying to do so would compromise their sources and methods. 

And,

While it is not clear that senior Russian officials approved the operation, it was far along in the planning and the United States had high confidence that it was under serious consideration, officials said.

And,

While the plan sounded far-fetched, American officials said they believed it could have worked to provide a spark for a Russian military operation — an outcome they said they hoped would be made less likely by exposing the effort publicly.

The highlights of the intelligence have been declassified, in hopes of both derailing the plot and convincing allies of the seriousness of the Russian planning. The officials interviewed for this article requested anonymity to discuss declassified but sensitive intelligence before it was released publicly.

 The article is meant to stimulate some reaction, any reaction, in America, in Europe and especially in Ukraine itself, whose enthusiasm for a conflict with Russia is a tad on the tepid dismissive side, to put it mildly. The military-industrial-media complex, ever in dire Want of ever more profits, is "exposing" a plot which may or may not exist. And when no film ends up getting made, it will be all the proof they need that the United States foiled the plot - which, let's be honest,  they themselves might have plotted. It has happened before. It actually sounds like part of the core curriculum for regime change as taught by the School of the Americas.

The top-rated reader comments to the Times article speak for themselves. That Mighty Wurlitzer just keeps right on wheezing and the played audience keeps right on clapping and Wanting more:

"So grateful for our intelligence community. They keep us safe."

"What credibility do we have as a country when Trump and almost half of the people in this country believe in manufacturing and fostering lies to overturn our own elections. What does the world actually think about anything we say when one of our political parties and its leader simply cannot be trusted and has proven to be a pawn of Putin?"

"The Biden national security team is playing a smart game keeping Putin off balance by exposing these schemes he's trying to gin up. This is a small payback for him and his goons getting involved in the 2016 election. It reminds me of the spy vs. spy black and white crow like figures in the mad magazine."

Oh, I don't know. The gaslit reader reactions kind of remind me more of this particular Mad character: