“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.” — George Orwell
The rise of disinformation czars and arbiters of truth is evidence of Orwell’s dictum. When regimes resort to rule by lie, narratives survive only with the backing of force. Half of Americans think national news media plan to misinform, mislead or persuade.
Censorship is an industry, a feed trough for government, corporations and academia. Artificial intelligence in the works to quell dissent and impose equity. Election meddling will likely not go away soon; the revolution will be colour.
The media sets the stage for regime change at home and abroad. At risk is citizenship, civil rights and any claim to the “land of my birth”. The timely warnings, and passing, of Hungarian political theorist Gáspár Tamás.
Evidence is left, right and centre that governments are using the principle of “tell a big lie and stick to it.” Whether from malice or to cover incompetence, officials routinely treat the public, in terms of accountability, with contempt.
If you dare question bureaucrats — well that’s proof that you, Citizen Smith, are guilty of disrespect.
“After a train carrying toxic material derailed in Ohio this month,” writes The New York Times, “right-wing commentators have been particularly critical of the response, using the crisis to sow distrust about government agencies and suggest that the damage could be irreparable.”
In other words if you examine, question, doubt or criticise anything that officials have or have not done, you are sowing distrust.
Journalist Seymour Herch found the U.S. culpable in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing — the state corporate media denounced him. That did not stop former NATO general and Czech president-elect Petr Pavel telling CNN: “They [Russians] feed their population with propaganda; they distort reality, and that’s why it’s so difficult to talk to them on any issues today.”
The actor Woody Harrelson quipped that “The biggest drug cartels in the world get together and buy up all the media and all the politicians and force all the people in the world to stay locked in their homes” and that same media accused him in near identical headlines of “blowing up” Saturday Night Live with conspiracy theories.
As news host Tucker Carlson reminded us, the first reaction of former Attorney General Bill Barr after Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide was to say, “No-one’s gonna believe it was a suicide. There’ll be conspiracy theories all over the place.”
Three-and-a-half years later the public is still waiting for an an official investigation into what happened, not because anyone cares about Epstein’s fate but because, as Carlson said, “for once, it would be nice to see the federal government forced to tell the truth about something.”
The U.S. federal government blamed a 70 per cent rise in attacks on the vulnerable electrical power grid exclusively on white supremacists. Last week’s planned supremacist “day of hate” passed without incident — perhaps because it was manufactured news.
The cartoonist Scott Adams is under fire for pointing out that critical race theory is reintroducing segregation. The Biden adminstration is unrelenting, announcing federal diversity compliance to shoehorn the population into cateogories — of which only some will be judged “protected.”
Does a lie, in conflict with reality, like a shoe ever wear itself out? Some people never “wake up” in the sense of engaging daily with abstract concepts but can lies outlive their usefulness to those in power?
And can that happen before a culture of government and corporate lying crushes the public’s fragile remaining trust? A Gallup poll suggests half of U.S. citizens think national news media plan to misinform, mislead or persuade the public. [1]
Artificial truthiness
The offical answer to public lack of trust is artificial intelligence. The Biden administration wants to use AI to push equity. Billionaire investor Bill Gates says AI must keep the peace, without which would-be rulers cannot rule unhindered. It must enforce who can say what, to whom, in what terms. He sees a role for his former company Microsoft’s search engine Bing, which now incorporates the AI chat bot ChatGPT.
As Jonathan Turley points out, Gates and crew frame it in terms of yet another emergency: the need to combat “political polarization,” as if there is no scope for debate or disagreement in this Brave New World. [2]
Has a consensus on truth put the majority of issues beyond popular and political contest or competence or, more likely, has the oligarchy agreed upon its own interest; the public be damned?
Plato’s noble lie did not require propaganda or the enforcement of censorship. In contrast the public was entertained with sports or religion that required constant affirmation — like the extremes of environmental and Woke dogma today.
This is a sign that the Great Narrative, as the World Economic Forum calls it, is increasingly hollow and lacks support — or perhaps it was never part of the noble lie but merely a story to rally the middle part of society, the managers and functionaries.
Yet artificial intelligence has a big problem. The Biden White House has already issued a special order for federal government to protect the public from algorithmic discrimination and to deploy AI in a way that promotes equity. If AI told the truth, Scott Adams says, the adminstration would have to make it illegal.
“The entire system depends on lies. If the lies fall apart there will be chaos. Artificial Intelligence cannot be allowed to tell the truth so long as it remains within human control.”
In such a system, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is quoted as saying, everyone must publicly avow their belief in the lie of the day:
“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
Surely Solzhenitsyn was writing under the authoritarian Soviet Union and Adams is writing in a liberal democracy, albeit flawed? Technology seems to be enabling those who would close the gap.
Years ago former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, later a Pentagon adviser, suggested that human behaviour could be improved by making words unsayable under the guise of “hate” or misinformation — George Orwell’s Newspeak from Nineteen Eighty-Four given an algorithmic update.
Schmidt proposed back in 2005 that search engines should only give one answer to a question.
“When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do,” he told public television host Charlie Rose at the time.
“Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant. You should look for information. We should get it exactly right.” [3]
Search results might not even provide links, since AI would compute the correct answer algorithmically, Schmidt proposed in an updated concept, discussed in 2011.
Joshua Benton writing at Nieman Lab worries that news organizations will suffer a further blow to their business if Google fails to provide links. He points out that database-driven answers can hardly provide the nuance and investigative context to answer political and social queries. [4]
Several writers and specialist researchers have tested ChatGPT and found it to be grounded in the orthodox or consensus view of science, which might suffice for a high school student writing about the evolution of insects but not whether humans should eat them as a staple.
The censorship industry
During social media’s first decade, until about 2015, the Internet was largely free of censorship.
Censorship is now an industry, funded primarily by government, though it gets less attention than surveillance capitalism, as described by Harvard social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff.
What motivated the change may have been the populist vote in 2016, and certainly involved the Russiagate hoax which, by definition, required the perpetrators to control the exposure of information.
Long-term planners may already have foreseen confrontation with Russia or their own population through the Covid response, and desired to use social networks and media as tools of soft power. It was in 2012 that president Barack Obama removed the Smith-Mundt restrictions on propagandizing the domestic U.S. population.
Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department official, says government has forced policy changes upon the private sector, coercing tech companies to create whole new categories of topics, thought or political ideas to censor — and then arming corporations with the artificial intelligence “to scan and ban the new thought violations that they themselves had helped install.” [5]
The release under Elon Musk of the Twitter files he calls “a tiny fraction of the censorship that was done in each of the major geopolitical events” of the past few years — largely revealing one-off requests for censorship.
Stanford University and the Election Integrity Initiative tracked almost 22 million tweets (containing for example a URL they identified as an election integrity “incident,” or which used certain keywords).
This cooperation exposed the presence of practically every national security-related institution: law enforcement, intelligence and health, academia and what the private foundations call civil society: the paid-for activists in non-profits, think tanks and charities.
A whole-of-society approach, Benz says, means several types of institution:
Government – DoD, FBI, CIA, DHS, CDC, HSS CISA, GEC, Elections Infrastructure Tech platforms - social networks, AI and machine learning, censorship tools;
Civil society – universities, non-profits, CSR money from the private sector foundations;
News media – fellow travelers manage public narratives; fact checkers.
It has become a new career path, says Benz.
“They have disinformation conferences, there will be representatives from all four institutions, they will negotiate their own preferences and needs, they will talk with each other about doing favours for favours. They will work out common terminologies and common problems they are having. They will have a revolving door at the professional level: people who are in government roles in misinformation, disinformation at DHS will get their next job in the German Marshall Fund or at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab, or the Alliance for Securing Democracy or a fellowship at Stanford University — it is a career path; it is a path to power.”
Corporate psychopaths
It is safer to leave open the question of motive. In this case, even if the primary motive is profit, the counter signals are sufficiently grave that they should alarm anyone who has taken an MBA module in business ethics or was schooled in the liberal arts — or even in war studies and the moral foundation of the just war.
The psychopathic nature of the corporation, legally bound to pursue profit above all else, is a compulsive force.
Banking has financialised every aspect of the market and, increasingly, society in a number of ways: by providing the debt that makes war possible and profitable; by creating the consumer credit market that drives over-consumption and asset price inflation; and by repeated booms, busts and bailouts which redistribute wealth to the richest, while undermining the stability of the monetary system itself.
Covid was used as the opportunity to reset the financial system, inflating the retail money supply with what asset manager BlackRock called “permanent helicopter money.”
Ask yourself who is behind BlackRock that it should have such influence on the privately-owned Federal Reserve central bank. One might conclude that it has to be connected to the those who own the central banks.
Corporate warriors
So much for the censorship of ideas; what about social movements or activists?
The conceit of social justice warriors, as the journalist Andy Ngô has written, is that they are not a movement: “we warriors” are motivated by righteousness, coming together spontaneously as individuals and only our opponents are organized.
This fig leaf is reflected in the corporate media portrayal of the vanguard of the environmental movement, or in race, gender, defund the police — trust us, we’re fighting the evil corporations who want to control the world. At the same time Micheal Moore and Jeff Gibbs in their documentary Survival Of The Humans (2019) exposed billionaire profiteering in the biofuels movement and the Rockefellers’ role in start-up funding of 350 Org that calls itself “a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis.”
Censorship is part of the deception that allows corporations to act in the shadows while shaping and influencing the “grassroots movement” — while the media takes money from those same billionaires in return for misleading the public. The chief funders of the state corporate media, from national to local level, from the BBC to The Guardian, include names like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Knight Foundation, Google, Omidyar Network, Facebook and more.
The billionaire foundations fund the corporate media, shape the narrative, and seed the ground for public policy — while officials make choreographed appearances on the international stage. The whole point of this effort is that we, the public, are not meant to detect the hand of private profit.
In 2014 after the Maidan coup, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland stood next to the flags of oil company Chevron in Ukraine; President Volodymyr Zelenskiy recently announced plans for BlackRock to profit from post-war reconstruction. You can be sure Larry Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, is concerned more with Ukraine’s considerable natural resources than with new panel-built homes for the country’s bombed out babushki.
The role of corporations behind color revolutions is not hidden and remains invisible only to those who will not see.
The Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development Samantha Power popped up this month in Hungary (a member state of the European Union which opposes arming Ukraine) and asserted that “democracy can win” — a barely-veiled snipe that prime minister Viktor Orbán, re-elected last year by a landslide, represents the “wrong kind” of democracy. [6]
The Western press, especially outlets close to Brussels, have demonised Orbán for pursing national interests. This misses the nuances of politics. This month saw the funeral of Hungarian political theorist Gáspár Tamás, who was once an ally of Orbán against the communist regime.
Though Tamás returned to his communist roots, they both would identify the threat that the globalist, federalist planners like those in Davos or Brussels have in mind.
Propaganda, the twisted sister of censorship, is used to reframe ideas that were once taken for granted, muddying concepts like citizenship in the maleable clay of “the common good.”
It was the War on Terror that president George W Bush used to redesignate citizenship as a privilege not a right, a move mirrored in the Home Office of Britain, that still calls itself a mother of parliaments and a home of democracy. Gone is birth right or as the Welsh anthem goes, “Hen Wlad fy Nhadau” (Land Of My Fathers) to be replaced by conditional access to facilities, which the government can withhold if, for any reason, it does not like you.
As Tamás put it in an article written presumably just before the events of September 11 2001:
“For Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist of fascism and political theologian of the Third Reich, those in power must judge who does and who does not belong to a given civic community. Citizenship became a function limited to his (or its) trenchant decree.
Certain categories of people, representing types crucial to the Enlightenment project of inclusion, became non-citizens and therefore, non-humans: communists meant the rebellious lower type, the masses brought in, leaderless and rudderless, by rootless universalism, and then rising up against the natural hierarchy; Jews, a community that survived the Christian middle ages without political power of its own, led by an essentially non-coercive authority, the people of the Book, by definition not a people of war; homosexuals, by their inability or unwillingness to procreate, bequeath and continue a living refutation of the alleged link between nature and history; the mentally ill, listening to voices unheard by the rest of us in other words, people whose recognition needs a moral effort and is not immediately (naturally) given, who can fit in only by enacting an equality of the unequal.
You will doubtless reply that the Enlightenment project of inclusion is still on track, alive and kicking and being extended in significant ways. Many countries now have honorary citizens i.e. human beings, who are not fully-fledged citizens but who have rights: children, foreigners, mental patients, prisoners, for example. The argument is gathering that they should no longer be bereft of their civic rights…
“Liberal nationalism, unlike ethnicism and fascism, is limited — if you wish, tempered — universalism. Fascism put an end to this shilly-shallying: the sovereign was judge of who does and does not belong to the civic community, and citizenship became a function of his (or its) trenchant decree.” [7]
If a citizen cannot hold an official to account, without being designated a troublemaker and put on a watch list or, ultimately, may see his or her rights held hostage — well, there are no civil rights.
Bureaucracy is the present threat to civil liberty. As Caroll Quigley wrote in The Anglo-American Establishment (1981) the societies within and behind government, such as the Rhodes Scholarship, Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations, tend towards a distaste for the parliamentary system, instead favouring “managerial revolution,” or “the growth of a group of managers behind the scenes, and beyond the control of public opinion, who seek to obtain what they regard as good for the people.”
Election meddling
Colour revolutions were a way in which the West “couped” (to borrow Elon Musk’s phrase with respect to the 2019 ousting of Evo Morales in Bolivia) “whoever we want.”
Like many techniques of political warfare, it has made its way home.
Before the 2020 U.S. general election the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) was run by Rosa Brooks, a former State Department official, adviser to the Open Society Foundation, and Georgetown University professor specializing in “democratization,” a euphemism for regime change.
The TIP’s report in Jun 2020 simulated a colour revolution in the event that the Electoral College should grant Trump victory in 2020, the aim: to withhold Democratic electors on the Jan 6 ratification. If necessary, Democratic states would threaten to secede and candidate Biden would call Black Lives Matter onto the streets.
U.S. media already had a close relationship with the national security state, dating from the Cold War and the contest with Communism. The same tools and techniques were deployed to frame populists or political dissenters as enemies.
The Department of Homeland Security, constrained by the First Amendment, outsourced censorship to the Election Integrity Project, mentioned above, involving civil society groups including the universities of Stanford and Washington. These coordinated so-called fact checkers to flag posts and alert social networks, as documented by the Transition Integrity Project itself, Time’s Molly Ball, Unlimited Hangout’s Whitney Webb and Foundation for Freedom Online’s Mike Benz, among others.
EIP on behalf of the DHS created a new censorship category of “legitimacy” which meant any post which criticized the legitimacy of the election result would fall foul of terms of service. After the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, the EIP rebranded itself as The Virality Project to support the pandemic and keep the team together, presumably so it could reappear in the U.S. general election of 2024.
The project is global, lest we should think it a matter of American politics.
In Germany, whose security service merged with the CIA after WW2, the government prepared in Apr 2021 to impose harsher pandemic restrictions in the face of resistance from the public and politicians. The domestic security service, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) established a monitoring category for lockdown opponents.
Opposition to lockdown was a subversive threat to the state to be added to the categories of far-right or left and religious fundamentalism. Military and national security are known to have done similarly in Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia.
