“Constant and continual alertness is the price of freedom. Constant willingness to fight back is the price of freedom.
There is no other price, actually.” [1]
L. Ron Hubbard
Based on what we have witnessed over the last few years our nation has arrived at a perilous pass. During the pandemic it became obvious that any voice in our country opposed to the shutdowns, challenging the vaccines or their mandates, or even entertaining the very obvious possibility that the Covid-19 virus was the result of “gain-of-function” research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, faced the likely backlash of being attacked and discredited in the media and/or partially or completely censored in their social media accounts. The recent testimony before Congress by award winning investigative journalists Matt Taibbi[2] and Michael Shellenberger[3] confirms this. Both men were key investigators of the “Twitter Files” [4] and both revealed in their testimony to the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government[5] that US government agencies were involved in instigating or coercing the social media censorship of individuals and information they deemed as dangerous or misleading. The following is quoted directly from Taibbi’s opening statement to the Select Subcommittee:
Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi testifying before Congress
“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere… What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role…
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State[6], even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index,[7] and others, many taxpayer-funded. A focus of this growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. The latter term is just a euphemism for ‘true but inconvenient.’ Plain and simple, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.[8]
“Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for ‘deamplification’ or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge. As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this sinister mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.
“Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense in such cases. But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken. Wittingly or not, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.”
The situation just described by Matt Taibbi in his statement to the Subcommittee should be of concern to every American, and both prompts AND answers the question: what kind of country are we becoming?
That answer seems to be that we are dwindling into a form of totalitarianism, in which the government—the executive branch and FBI/ justice department, the military, intelligence agencies like CIA and NSA, as well as the NIH, FDA and CDC—the media and tech corporations, military contractors and pharmaceutical companies, all operate as an unholy alliance, intent on replacing our constitutional republic with some type of fascist oligarchy. Ironically, they are doing this even as they say that the actions they take are being done to “preserve our democracy”, which is an obvious lie. If we allow things to continue like this, the reality is that we will face a near future devoid of the rights and freedoms that have been our birthright in this country for the last 250 years. During the recent pandemic we’ve already seen how quickly this can happen; how quickly many of us will surrender those rights on the promise of a small bit of fancied security, which was also a lie.
At the outset of this article I led with a famous quote from L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Dianetics and Scientology:
“Constant and continual alertness is the price of freedom. Constant willingness to fight back is the price of freedom.There is no other price, actually.”
From here on out it will take a lot of us paying that price if we are to have a chance in hell of halting our nation’s downward slide.
Copyright©2024
By Mark Arnold
All Rights Reserved
________________________
[1] Quoted from the lecture “The Genus of Dianetics and Scientology”, delivered on 31 December, 1960 by L. Ron Hubbard, Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress.
[2] Matthew Colin Taibbi (born March 2, 1970) is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, former co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast, and publisher of the Racket News (formerly TK News) on Substack.
[3] Michael D. Shellenberger (born June 16, 1971) is a professor, author, and journalist who writes on a wide range of topics including free speech, homelessness, and the environment. He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition. Shellenberger founded the pro-nuclear non-profit Environmental Progress in 2016.
[4] After SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk became owner and CEO of Twitter in October of 2022, he worked with independent journalists to share internal documents about the company’s content moderation policies and procedures under its prior ownership. These stories have become known as the Twitter Files. The files show the social media company had been intertwined with a government–private censorship apparatus. Twitter suppressed or removed content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company was under government pressure to purge such content and its purveyors from the platform, though most of the time it was cooperating with the censorship requests willingly, the documents indicate.
[5] The United States House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is a select subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee created by the House on January 10, 2023. Established to investigate alleged abuses of federal authority, including collusion between federal agencies and private sector entities to suppress conservative viewpoints, the committee has broad authority to subpoena law enforcement and national security agencies, including concerning ongoing criminal investigations.
[6] The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is an agency within the Bureau of Global Affairs at the United States Dept. of State. Established in 2016, its mission is to lead U.S. government efforts to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations” around the world.
[7] Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a not-for-profit organization based in the United Kingdom that aims to purportedly mitigate the spread of disinformation on the internet. The group utilizes a system of ratings of news sources and websites to determine risk of disinformation. The group’s efforts also include investigations into internet advertising, and the alleged use of disinformation in relation to COVID-19 featured on various websites. The group has faced scrutiny over apparent political bias, and has been categorized as a political left think tank.
[8] McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, was the political repression and persecution of left-wing individuals and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet influence on American institutions and of Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s. After the mid-1950s, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had spearheaded the campaign, gradually lost his public popularity and credibility after several of his accusations were found to be false.