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

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: