Twitter has banned the account of controversial virologist Dr Robert Malone, who reportedly had half a million followers at the time of his removal. Malone is credited even by mainstream critics as having played a significant role in the development of the mRNA technology being used for Covid-19 vaccines today, but has recently come under fire for comments about the safety of those vaccines’ use on children which the Authorized Fact Checkers have labeled “dangerously and flagrantly incorrect.”

Everyone should oppose the removal of Malone and commentators who share his views, regardless of whether they agree with them or vehemently despise them. The reason for this is very simple: only a fool would support government-tied monopolistic billionaire corporations regulating public discourse about Covid responses which affect us all. This is true regardless of what you personally happen to believe about mRNA vaccines.

Arguments that Malone and his ilk are peddling “misinformation” have no bearing on the question of whether they should be removed from the platforms everyone uses to debate ideas and discuss information. It is entirely legitimate to make arguments that their claims are inaccurate, but it is not at all legitimate to claim that platforms which large sectors of humanity have come to rely on for public discourse should interfere with or obstruct those conversations.

Dr. Malone may be right or may be wrong in his views regarding Covid vaccines.

But he is a respectable scientist, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology(!), and so has the right to state his scientific opinion.

There is no justification for suspending him. It’s a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/rG9jSV8QD9

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) December 29, 2021

Even if we were to accept unconditionally the position that people should be banned from such platforms if they are posting “misinformation”, who exactly do we imagine would be determining whether something is misinformation or not? Will we be consulting some impartial, agendaless, omniscient demigod through some sort of crystal ball or magical rune portal? Or would we in fact be relying on flawed human beings looking at the information through the lens of their own cognitive biases, agendas, perceptual distortions and knowledge limitations?

I ask because historically what these giant Silicon Valley corporations have been doing to determine who gets to have a voice and who doesn’t is working in consultation with think tanks funded by governments and the military-industrial complex like the Atlantic Council and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, as well as working with the US government directly to an increasingly intimate degree. This fact is devastating to the popular argument that these are merely private corporations enforcing their Terms of Service, since they are becoming inseparably interwoven with government power. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Public discourse is consolidated on these gigantic platforms to such an extent that getting your ideas heard by a large number of people requires participation in them, and now they are determining how issues of such immense political importance as government pandemic responses may be discussed, and doing so in increasingly intimate collaboration with the most powerful governments on earth.

These restrictions on public discourse about the way human civilization responds to Covid-19 were first normalized in 2020 by the deplatforming of weirdos like David Icke for conspiracy theories linking coronavirus symptoms to 5G, and that normalization has continued to metastasize so far over the last year and a half that it’s now considered perfectly acceptable for these platforms to ban a popular scientific researcher whose work helped develop mRNA vaccines for expressing his scientific opinion about them.

Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

“We shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication”https://t.co/J94ZVvi7YK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 3, 2020

Humanity is a mess. We’re dealing with so many deep, deep problems and facing so many existential hurdles in our immediate future, and it’s clear that the people in charge aren’t going to navigate us through them with any degree of skill. This means we’re going to have to figure things out as a collective, and we’re not going to be able to do that if we’re forbidden from communicating with each other in ways the powerful don’t approve.

Certainly allowing human speech to flourish unrestricted would mean a lot of people saying things that we disagree with, and even saying things that are objectively and demonstrably wrong. But the alternative is allowing speech to be controlled by the same power structure which saw fit to invade Iraq, which is currently committing genocide in Yemen and pushing us toward direct military confrontation with Russia and China. Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse.

The future of humanity depends on our ability to bring light to the darkness, to bring awareness to that of which we are not aware. As with individual awakening, a collective awakening will necessarily be sloppy, clumsy, and full of confrontation and awkward conversations. But it’s the only way we can begin working our way toward becoming a species whose actions are based on truth rather than untruth, on consciousness rather than unconsciousness. Until that happens, we will necessarily continue along our self-destructive trajectory.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo. The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society’s corrupt systems.

But it never happened. Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we’ve been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically. Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.

So what went wrong? Nobody’s buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling. How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?

The answer is algorithm manipulation.

Here’s @YouTube‘s CEO openly admitting to:

1) Ranking corporate news higher in YT’s algorithim
2)Suppressing independent news/politics channels
3)Suppressing people creating content “from their basement” (THE ORIGINAL PURPOSE of YT)

This is scandaloushttps://t.co/B8G2AYvBul

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) April 22, 2021

Last month a very informative interview saw the CEO of YouTube, which is owned by Google, candidly discussing the way the platform uses algorithms to elevate mainstream news outlets and suppress independent content.

At the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Technology Governance Summit, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson that while the platform still allows arts and entertainment videos an equal shot at going viral and getting lots of views and subscribers, on important areas like news media it artificially elevates “authoritative sources”.

“What we’ve done is really fine-tune our algorithms to be able to make sure that we are still giving the new creators the ability to be found when it comes to music or humor or something funny,” Wojcicki said. “But when we’re dealing with sensitive areas, we really need to take a different approach.”

Wojcicki said in addition to banning content deemed harmful, YouTube has also created a category labeled “borderline content” which it algorithmically de-boosts so that it won’t show up as a recommended video to viewers who are interested in that topic:

“When we deal with information, we want to make sure that the sources that we’re recommending are authoritative news, medical science, et cetera. And we also have created a category of more borderline content where sometimes we’ll see people looking at content that’s lower quality and borderline. And so we want to be careful about not over-recommending that. So that’s a content that stays on the platform but is not something that we’re going to recommend. And so our algorithms have definitely evolved in terms of handling all these different content types.”

Progressive commentator Kyle Kulinski has a good video out reacting to Wojcicki’s comments, saying he believes his (entirely harmless) channel has been grouped in the “borderline” category because his views and new subscribers suddenly took a dramatic and inexplicable plunge. Kulinski reports that overnight he went from getting tens of thousands of new subscriptions per month to maybe a thousand.

“People went to YouTube to escape the mainstream nonsense that they see on cable news and on TV, and now YouTube just wants to become cable news and TV,” Kulinski says. “People are coming here to escape that and you’re gonna force-feed them the stuff they’re escaping like CNN and MSNBC and Fox News.”

It is not terribly surprising to hear Susan Wojcicki admit to elevating the media of the oligarchic empire to the CEO of a neoconservative publication at the World Economic Forum. She comes from the same elite empire management background as all the empire managers who’ve been placed in charge of mainstream media outlets by their plutocratic owners, having gone to Harvard after being literally raised on the campus of Stanford University as a child. Her sister Anne is the founder of the genetic-testing company 23andMe and was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google itself also uses algorithms to artificially boost empire media in its searches. In 2017 World Socialist Website (WSWS) began documenting the fact that it, along with other leftist and antiwar outlets, had suddenly experienced a dramatic drop in traffic from Google searches. In 2019 the Wall Street Journal confirmed WSWS claims, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results.” In 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to censoring WSWS at a Senate hearing in response to one senator’s suggestion that Google only censors right wing content.

Google, for the record, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA. It pours massive amounts of money into federal lobbying and DC think tanks, has a cozy relationship with the NSA, and has been a military-intelligence contractor from the beginning.

We should be extremely alarmed that the Atlantic Council—funded by NATO and the state department and Gulf monarchies and weapons companies—is telling Facebook who to delete https://t.co/7N6fDjDSHR pic.twitter.com/W2zLmx1MKI

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) August 25, 2018

Then you’ve got Facebook, where a third of Americans regularly get their news. Facebook is a bit less evasive about its status quo-enforcing censorship practices, openly enlisting the government-and-plutocrat-funded imperialist narrative management firm The Atlantic Council to help it determine what content to censor and what to boost. Facebook has stated that if its “fact checkers” like The Atlantic Council deem a page or domain guilty of spreading false information, it will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

All the algorithm stacking by the dominant news distribution giants Google and Facebook also ensures that mainstream platforms and reporters will have far more followers than indie media on platforms like Twitter, since an article that has been artificially amplified will receive far more views and therefore far more clicks on their social media information. Mass media employees tend to clique up and amplify each other on Twitter, further exacerbating the divide. Meanwhile left and antiwar voices, including myself, have been complaining for years that Twitter artificially throttles their follower count.

If not for these deliberate acts of sabotage and manipulation by Silicon Valley megacorporations, the mainstream media which have deceived us into war after war and which manufacture consent for an oppressive status quo would have been replaced by independent media years ago. These tech giants are the life support system of corporate media propaganda.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

By Alan MACLEOD

The Twitter account of the Russian COVID-19 “Sputnik V” vaccine was suspended yesterday after the Silicon Valley-based platform detected suspicious attempts to log into it. Raising more eyebrows was the stated location of the attempted hack: not Russia, but Virginia, U.S.A.

The news immediately prompted Internet sleuths to question who was behind the hack. “Now who in Virginia might want to sabotage a global health initiative by one of Washington’s “official enemies?” wrote former MintPress contributor Morgan Artyukhina. Virginia is, of course, home to many of the three-letter national security agencies engaged in online warfare, including the CIA. Many social media users suggested this was evidence of a failed nefarious action. Sputnik’s Twitter account has since been reinstated.

Named after the first manmade satellite to orbit the Earth, the vaccine is among the first to be developed and brought to market. With rich nations buying up huge quantities of Western vaccines before they were even approved, leaving little for poorer states, Sputnik is primarily being used in Russia, Asia, and Latin America. Already, 727 million doses have been ordered by 50 countries, including 200 million from India and 160 million from Russia. Meanwhile, Brazil has ordered 100 million and Mexico 24 million. Bolivia, Argentina, and Venezuela are also major customers. In December, Hungary became the first EU nation to purchase the shots, and there is a possibility that the vaccine could be rolled out across the continent soon. Testing occurred in a number of nations in the Global South and the vaccine will be produced in nine countries.

Like Western variants, Sputnik must be delivered in two shots weeks apart and must also be stored in deep freezer conditions (-18°C/-0.4°F). Developed by the state-run Gamaleya Institute, it is a viral vector vaccine, meaning that it employs another virus to carry the DNA encoding of the desired immune response into cells. Protein coding genes from the coronavirus are inserted into two common cold-like viruses that have been genetically modified so they cannot replicate inside the human body. Trial results suggest that the injections are between 91-95% effective, similar to the Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines.

However, Western politicians and press have been casting doubts and fears on the safety and effectiveness of the product for months, describing it as “controversial” (The Guardian) or “rushed” (BBC). Others, such as CNN and CNBC have characterized it as unsafe and ineffective.

The new Cold War

This is perhaps unsurprising, given the new levels of anti-Russian sentiment expressed in the corporate media since 2016. A central claim from many in the Democratic Party is that the Russian government strongly interfered in the presidential election and swung the result for Donald J. Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin is supposedly in possession of incriminating evidence on Trump, making the man in the White House a “Siberian candidate,” according to many. Russophobic sentiment has reached such heights that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper could appear on NBC’s Meet the Press to claim that Russians are “genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate [and] gain favor” and receive no push back at all.

Democrats also immediately saw Russia’s hand behind the deadly storming of the Capitol Building earlier this month. “A complete tool of Putin, this president is. Putin’s goal was to diminish the view of democracy in the world. That’s what he has been about … the president gave him the biggest of all of his many gifts to Putin” said Nancy Pelosi. “This is the day that Vladimir Putin has waited for since he had to leave East Germany as a young KGB officer,” reacted Obama advisor Ben Rhodes. “Putin’s Disinformation Campaign Claims Stunning Victory With Capitol Hill ‘Coup’” wrote Omer Benjakob in Haaretz.

But while many in the Democratic Party see Trump as being either soft on (or controlled by) Putin, in reality, the 45th president has adopted a highly aggressive policy towards Moscow. Trump’s administration armed far-right rebel groups in Ukraine, something Obama shied away from. He also increased sanctions on Russia, bombed a Russian military base in Syria, and walked away from a number of anti-nuclear treaties crucial in maintaining the peace between the two powers.

As a result, Americans’ view of Russia has crashed. As late as 2011, a substantial majority of the country saw Russia in a positive light. Today, the country has a 28% favorable and a 72% unfavorable rating. By comparison, in 1989, during the Cold War, 62% of Americans saw the Soviet Union as either “highly” or “mostly” favorable, according to historic data from pollster Gallup.

Despite the Western speculation about the vaccine’s effectiveness, Sputnik V is considered a superior, more trustworthy vaccine by people in the Global South, according to a study of 11 nations conducted by British polling group YouGov. Good thing too, as, lacking the ability to pay, they might not be able to receive any other COVID-19 shot. Although Russia continues to be a central issue in U.S. politics, it is doubtful whether this attempted hack will receive anything like the attention other alleged hacks going the other way have received.

mintpressnews.com

The Facebook founder’s unusual LLC philanthropy allows him to blur the lines between business, charity, and politics.

by Michael VOLPE

Imagine an organization that lobbies for progressive laws while providing venture-capital funding to techno-futurist endeavors. It gives to numerous charitable causes in its own region—funding homeless shelters, Boys & Girls Clubs, and other community organizations—while also participating in political advocacy and influence at the state and national levels. It spends a fortune every year on cutting-edge innovations in science and technology while funding a grade school designed to produce the next generation of left-wing activists. It leverages billions of dollars in assets for social change, all without the limits and transparency required of a traditional, nonprofit philanthropic organization.

The person behind such a project would have to be exceptionally creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative. He is—and his name is Mark Zuckerberg.

CZI does have several affiliate and subsidiary organizations, though, some of which are 501(c)3s. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Foundation, for instance, is a traditional grantmaking non-profit with $4,650,890,520 in assets according to its most recent financial statement. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Advocacy Fund is another affiliated non profit with $101,062,685.

FWD.us claims to look for bipartisan solutions, stating on its website, “A majority of Americans support immigration and criminal justice reform, and we’re working with legislators and groups on both sides of the aisle to drive real change at the local, state, and federal levels.” But a statement issued shortly after the election suggests that “bipartisan” is really code for “liberal” here:

We want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their historic victory and celebrate the opportunity for progress it provides our nation.

As we saw with years of public backlash throughout President Trump’s entire term, voters from all walks of life repudiated Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, demagoguery, and xenophobia. President Trump made his assault on the immigration system and immigrant families a signature issue for his presidency, and the public voted him out.

Tech titans, of course, are not merely interested observers on the immigration issue. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley has benefited greatly from H1-B visas, which allow them to hire IT and other tech specialists from other countries, especially India and China. These foreign workers tend to work for less than their American equivalents, and there are longstanding complaints that the tech industry has abused the visa program.

Trump shut down H1-B Visas earlier this year, while Biden has shown himself much more Big Tech-friendly on this issue. As noted by immigration resource Path2USA:

Vice President Joe Biden’s victory in the US Presidential elections will be a victory for US immigration as well. Promising a comprehensive immigration reform, Joe Biden not only intends to increase the H1-B visa quota but also resume work permits for spouses of H1-B visa holders.

With an intention to reverse many of the restrictive immigration policies imposed by the outgoing Trump administration, Joe Biden is being hailed as the President that will bring fairness to skilled foreign workers that will support and improve the U.S. economy equally.

When it’s not pushing policies that coincidentally cut Silicon Valley’s costs, CZI directs many of its resources toward impact investing—one of the left’s preferred methods of social change, in which venture capital is directed specifically to startups expected to advance progressive goals.

One of its flagship projects is the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which supports forward-thinking medical research and technology. In the group’s own words: “At the Biohub, we actively nurture and create opportunities for leaders in science and technology to come together and drive discovery, setting the standard for collaborative science.”

Biohub projects include some mind-blowing research like the Cell Atlas initiative:

The Cell Atlas will be made available to researchers around the world, shedding light on the many different types of cells that control the body’s major organs, including the brain, heart and lungs.

This type of resource has never been created. Much of the technology necessary to complete the Cell Atlas was only developed recently. These new tools will be deployed at CZ Biohub and other participating institutions to map the cells of the human body in unprecedented detail.

CZI funds bio-imaging technology and open-source science research software in its portfolio as well.

Outside of the medical realm, CZI has devoted substantial capital to education technology. Some of the beneficiaries have been remarkably successful, such as Age of Learning, which created ABCmouse, a popular educational website for kids two to eight. Brightwheel, another recipient of CZI ventral capital, creates apps for early childhood education. Another, Eruditus, runs high-budget courses for corporate executives. CZI also recently devoted $6.3 million to “equity in education.”

Elsewhere, CZI’s educational ventures are overtly political. The Chang Zuckerberg Initiative is a key backer of PilotEd, a school initiative that utilizes a highly unorthodox, unabashedly progressive curriculum. PilotEd currently operates one school in Indianapolis, and is working on opening its second in Las Vegas.

A feature on CZI’s website boasts of PilotEd’s unconventional methods:

For students at pilotED, issues of identity are worked directly into the curriculum along with social-emotional learning. For example, a history lesson about Plymouth Rock includes the traditional story of the gathering of Pilgrims and indigenous people. But it also includes what is left out of traditional history books. Teachers talk with students about who they identify with in the story. Do they see themselves as someone who is persecuted for their beliefs or as someone who experiences genocide? The lesson would wrap up with a discussion on emotions and questions such as “What would it feel like if that was your family, or if it was your friend?”

The same feature opens with a glowing report on seven-year-old PilotEd elementary students being inserted into racial protests in Indianapolis this summer.

But even the intensely woke PilotEd is far from the LLC’s most explicit bit of politicking. In 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative dove headfirst into two key ballot initiatives in its home state of California. Here is more from their website:

Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), announced additional funding for two 2020 California ballot measure committees. This includes an additional $4.5 million in support of Proposition 15, which would restore an estimated $12 billion annually in much-needed local revenue to California communities by closing commercial property tax loopholes; and $1 million to the No on Proposition 20 campaign to oppose a measure that would incarcerate more people for low-level crimes and increase already bloated prison budgets.

The criminal justice reform also strikes a bipartisan tone on paper. CZI claims, “The justice system’s emphasis on punishment over rehabilitation profoundly impacts our communities. We’re focused on finding new ways forward by safely reducing incarceration, providing fair chances for those impacted, and lifting up the voices of people closest to the problem.”

One CZI-supported criminal justice program is Fair and Just Prosecution, which brings new prosecutors together to “talk about best practices”—effectively a brainstorm group for prosecutors. It’s an interesting program to consider in light of the coordinated campaign by left-wing mega-donors to fill prosecutors’ offices with progressives.

The CZI-opposed Prop. 20 was rejected handily in California’s November election. CZI’s favored Prop. 15, though—heavily unpopular from the start—was also rejected, by a much narrower margin. But this is not necessarily indicative of CZI’s potential to effect change.

It’s now the stuff of business legend that Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, was the original investor in Facebook. When Zuckerberg arrived in Palo Alto in 2004, he had a website with exponential growth in accounts but no revenue, let alone profits. A few short months later, Thiel famously invested the first $500,000 and several other rounds of venture capital followed. In May 2012, Facebook went public. Thiel sold off the majority of his stock that same year, with his half-million dollars netting nearly $1 billion. Zuckerberg has since created Facebook Live, bought WhatsApp and Instagram, and is now investing in virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Facebook is currently valued at around $800 billion.

Less well known, though probably more important, is that Thiel passed on several rounds of further financing, believing at the time Facebook was overvalued based on the money raised. He would later call these moves his biggest professional mistake, saying that he underestimated Facebook’s potential for exponential growth. In effect, Thiel underestimated Zuckerberg.

With CZI now likewise in its early years, nobody should make the same mistake again.

theamericanconservative.com

And what is that desired ‘mentality’? It is to embrace the transfiguration of American and European identity and way-of-life. The presumptive U.S. President Elect, the European élites, and top ‘woke’ élites moreover, are publicly committed to such “transformation”: “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world,” (Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, declared, celebrating Joe Biden’s ‘victory’); “Trump’s defeat can be the beginning of the end of the triumph of far-right populisms also in Europe”, claimed Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council.

In short, the ‘Iron Curtain’ descends when supposedly private enterprises (Big Digital) mutually inter-penetrate with – and then claim – the State: No longer the non-believer facing this coming metamorphosis is to be persuaded – he can be compelled. Regressive values held on identity, race and gender quickly slipped into a ‘heresy’ labelling. And as the BLM activists endlessly repeat: “Silence is no option: Silence is complicity”.

With the advent of Silicon Valley ideology’s ubiquitous ‘reach’, the diktat can be achieved through weaponising ‘Truth’ via AI, to achieve a ‘machine learning fairness’ that reflects only the values of the coming revolution – and through AI ‘learning’ mounting that version of binary ‘truth’, up and against an adversarial ‘non-truth’ (its polar opposite). How this inter-penetration came about is through a mix of early CIA start-up funding; connections and contracts with state agencies, particularly relating to defence; and in support for propaganda campaigns in service to ‘governmentalist’ narratives.

These U.S. Tech platforms have, for some time, become effectively fused into the ‘Blue State’ – particularly in the realms of intelligence and defence – to the extent that these CEOs no longer see themselves as state ‘partners’ or contractors, but rather, as some higher élite leadership, precisely shaping and directing the future of the U.S. Their objective however, is to advance beyond the American ‘sphere’, to a notion that such an élite oligarchy eventually would be directing a future ‘planetary governance’. One, in which their tech tools of AI, analytics, robotics and machine-learning, would become the mathematical and digital scaffold around whose structure, the globe in all its dimensions is administered. There would be no polity – only analytics.

The blatant attempt by Big Tech platforms and MSM to write the narrative of the 2020 Facebook and Twitter U.S. Election – coupled with their campaign to insist that dissent is either the intrusion of enemy disinformation, ‘lies’ coming from the U.S. President, or plain bullsh*t – is but the first step to re-defining ‘dissenters’ as security risks and enemies of the good.

The mention of ‘heresy and disinformation’ additionally plays the role of pushing attention away from the gulf of inequality between smug élites and skeptical swathes of ordinary citizenry. Party élites might be notoriously well-known for unfairly enriching themselves, but as fearless knights leading the faithful to battle, élites can become again objects of public and media veneration – heroes who can call believers ‘once more unto the breach!’.

The next step is already being prepared – as Whitney Webb notes:

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, GCHQ, which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda”, [and that] raise concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development – and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.

Similar efforts are underway in the U.S., with the military recently funding a CIA-backed firm … to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis, and the U.S. military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed …

The Times reported that GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so … The GCHQ cyber war will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda”, but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”

The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.

Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism … Similarly, a think tank tied to U.S. intelligence argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the U.S. ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”

Just to be clear, it is not just the ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence Community at work – YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided this week to remove a Ludwig von Mises Institute video, with more than 1.5 million views, for challenging aspects of U.S. policy on the Coronavirus.

What on earth is going on? The Mises Institute as ‘extremist’, or purveyor of enemy disinformation? (Of course, there are countless other examples.)

Well, in a word, it is ‘China’. Maybe it is about fears that China will surpass the U.S. economically and in Tech quite shortly. It is no secret that the U.S., the UK and Europe, more generally, have botched their handling of Covid, and may stand at the brink of recession and financial crisis.

China, and Asia more generally, has Covid under much better control. Indeed, China may prove to be the one state likely to grow economically over the year ahead.

Here’s the rub: The pandemic persists. Western governments largely have eschewed full lockdowns, whilst hoping to toggle between partial social-distancing, and keeping the economy open – oscillating between turning the dials up or down on both. But they are achieving neither the one (pandemic under control), nor the other (saving themselves from looming economic breakdown). The only exit from this conundrum that the élites can see is to vaccinate everyone as soon as possible, so that they can go full-steam on the economy – and thus stop China stealing a march on the West.

But 40%-50% of Americans say they would refuse vaccination. They are concerned about the long term safety for humans of the new mRNA technique – concerns, it seems, that are destined to be rigorously de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

There is no evidence, yet, that either the Moderna or the Pfizer experimental vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths. If there were, the public has not been told. There is no information about how long any protective benefit from the vaccine would persist. There is no information about safety. Not surprisingly there is public caution, which GCHQ and Big Digital intend to squash.

The digital Iron Curtain is not just about America. U.S. algorithms, and social media, saturate Europe too. And Europe has its ‘populists’ and state ‘deplorables’ (currently Hungary and Poland), on which Brussels would like to see the digital ‘Curtain’ of denigration and political ostracism descend.

This month, Hungary and Poland vetoed the EU bloc’s €1.8 trillion budget and recovery package in retaliation for Brussel’s plan effectively to fine them for violating the EU’s ‘rule of law’ principles. As the Telegraph notes, “Many European businesses are depending on the cash and, given the ‘second wave’ of coronavirus hitting the continent, Brussels fears that the Visegrád Group allies” could hold a recovery hostage to their objections to the EU ‘rule-of-law’ ‘fines’).

What’s this all about? Well, Orbán’s justice minister has introduced a series of constitutional changes. Each of them triggering ‘rule-of-law’ disputes with the EU. The most contentious amendment is an anti-LGBT one, stating explicitly that the mother is a woman, the father is a man. It will add further restrictions for singles and gay couples adopting children, and it will confine gender transition to adults.

Orbán’s veto is yet more evidence of a new Iron Curtain descending down the spine of – this time – Europe. The ‘Curtain’ again is cultural, and has nothing to do with ‘law’. Brussels makes no secret of its displeasure that many Central and Eastern European member-states will not sign up to ‘progressive’ (i.e. woke) values. At its root lies the tension that “whilst Western Europe is de-Christianising, Europe’s central and eastern states are re-Christianising – the faith having been earlier a rallying point against communism”, and now serving as the well-spring to these states’ post-Cold War emerging identity. (It is not so dissimilar to some ‘Red’ American conservative constituencies that also are reaching back to their Christian roots, in the face of America’s political polarisation.)

These combined events point to a key point of inflection occurring in the western polity: A constellation of state and state-extended apparatuses has openly declared war on dissent (‘untruths’), foreign ‘disinformation’ and opinion unsupported by their own ‘fact-checking’.

It takes concrete form through Big Digital’s quiet sanctioning and punitive policing of online platforms, under the guise of tackling abuse; through nation-wide mandatory re-education and training programmes in anti-racism and critical social theory in schools and places of work; by embedding passive obedience and acquiescence amongst the public through casting anti-vaxxers as extremists, or as security risks; and finally, by mounting a series of public spectacles and theatre by ‘calling out’ and shaming sovereigntists and cultural ‘regressives’, who merit being ‘cancelled’.

In turn, it advances an entire canon of progressivism rooted in critical social theory, anti-racism and gender studies. It has too its own revisionist history (narratives such as the 1619 Project) and progressive jurisprudence for translation into concrete law.

But what if half of America rejects the next President? What if Brussels persists with imposing its separate progressive cannon? Then the Iron Curtain will descend with the ring of metal falling onto stone. Why? Precisely because those adhering to their transformative mission see ‘calling out’ transgressors as their path to power – a state in which dissent and cultural heresy can be met with enforcement (euphemistically called the ‘rule of law’ in Brussels). Its’ intent is to permanently keep dissenters passive, and on the defensive, fearing being labelled ‘extremist’, and through panicking fence-sitters into acquiescence.

Maintaining a unified western polity may no longer be possible under such conditions. Should the losers in this struggle (whomsoever that may be), come to fear being culturally overwhelmed by forces that see their way-of-being as a heresy which must be purged, we may witness a powerful turn towards political self-determination.

When political differences become irreconcilable, the only (non-violent) alternative might come to be seen to lie with the fissuring of political union.

I was born at the end of Gen X … and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good … Our home was modest, but we went on vacations, had 2 cars … I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift … As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption.

I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years … We don’t have cell phones … We hardly ever eat out. What I just described is life on 60K a year without going into debt. We working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into, has also been robbed from under us.

I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all-out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child.

I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin colour, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility. And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine – and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us – and told us that it was honest and fair.

I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heart-breaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.

I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to, or from, the society they live in. I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but fu*k these mother**kers to hell and back, for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all.

America shudders. This is not just ‘politics as usual’. This is not even about President Trump (albeit that most Blue supporters believe so). This is not even just about America. There are moments when – collectively, as well as individually – civilisations reach to a fork in the road. American and West European civilisation is at such a point. Two poles, the coastal élites and the American central heartland, are colliding and the sparks and twisted metal resulting from this head-on crash will be the heat that will forge Red American civilisation into a step-shift (whatever that may lead). The after-effects will shape America, and Europe too, where Euro-élites are often little more than simulacra of those U.S. ‘coastal élites’.

Whomsoever ends up in the White House, America now is irredeemably split. As U.S. historian Mike Vlahos writes: “Progressives pledge their lives to this mission, while just as passionately, Red voters swear to stop it. This word marks the title, the banner, and the proscenium framing an existential struggle. Transformation is the watchword of our national battleground”.

Red state Americans – as the excerpt above illustrates – view the election as a ‘coup’ against them. They feel that white Americans have been demonized as innately racist, and (quite naturally) are feeling vulnerable. It has taken them a long time to catch on, but now they ‘get it’: whiteness is viewed by much of Blue America as “pathologically” supremacist, and pathological ‘racism’ must be exorcised, the latter insist.

The problem facing America is that Silicon Valley/Blue alliance insiders will be aware that there have been election irregularities. (Election shenanigans are nothing new in the U.S., and the scale of this episode remains to be proved). Yet Red America is alleging fraud. A narrative is being set. Biden will have a legitimacy problem – whatever way you slice the outcome.

Axis members loath Trump utterly, and in any case, probably would regard any putative ‘steal’ as legitimate – in order finally to get rid of Trump. Perhaps the scale of Trump support in those key swing states took them off guard. After the failure of Russiagate, and after the fail of impeachment, an abandonment of lip-service to American democracy – in deed, if not in word – may have seemed a price worth paying. Anything to exit Trump …

“Trump is a racist and a misogynist. Surely that is enough? Pointing up facts is not demonisation”, was the retort from Blue supporters. In other words, “how could voters be so dumb as to pull the [voting] lever for Trump twice”. Any ‘rational person’ would understand the last four years as an ongoing catastrophe, these supporters complain bemusedly.

One history teacher in a prestige U.S. school suggests:

“I have a simple answer to this [mindset] which comes from rational observation of teenage students mostly from well-heeled backgrounds: The cosmopolitan elites of the media and academia establishment, like the presupposing college-bound teen, with senioritis, and who has the world, ‘all figured out’, fail to grasp the blinkered nature of their own world view; in so doing, they fail to comprehend the full complexity of reality itself”.

“The world view to which I am referring goes by many names—rationalism, secularism, humanism etc. It is a view that emanates from what I call the Enlightenment Myth: the idea that we arrived at the modern world by wholesale jettisoning of religion, tradition, and custom. It’s the idea that modernity was built from the ground-up, through secularized reason. As the AP European History concept outline in my textbook uncritically puts it: “They [Enlightenment thinkers] sought to bring the light of reason to bear on the darkness of prejudice, outmoded traditions, and ignorance – challenging traditional values”.

“Of note is not this drab statement itself, but the fact that its authors, like my students and the pollsters who predicted electoral carnage for Trump this election, take [the inevitable trouncing of Trump] as a matter of fact – as opposed to ideology-driven historiography, open to debate.” I.e. they, [Blue adherents], sought to bring the light of reason to bear on the darkness of prejudice, outmoded traditions, and ignorance – through challenging the traditional values of Trump voters in flyover country.

It tells us why collision ultimately is inevitable. The Blue zeitgeist sees facts which are not up for discussion. There will be ‘no prisoners taken’ in their quest to cleanse America of systemic racism – these are their ‘facts’. As Professor Vlahos cautions: “At end of this long game, the intended woke outcome for our future is a different civilization”.

Here then, are the principal components to the coming train-wreck. Firstly – contrary to the hubris – the election was never just about Trump qua individual: The Blue vitriol went well beyond Trump – to some 70 million Americans that have been called vile, bigots, racists, etc. Saying that ‘we need to listen to each other’ won’t walk this back. Bromide is not enough. This Red constituency now is ‘locked and loaded’.

Secondly, the disputed election results have opened a path for the White House not only to contest particular election results for wrongdoing, but in the case of Pennsylvania, to petition to the Supreme Court on (separate) grounds of constitutional breach through states’ setting of election rules, which were not authorized by their legislatures, which could repercuss much more widely on to the whole issue of mail-in ballots.

And – even – it opens the possibility to persuade GOP state legislators to choose Electoral College delegates according to conscience (should they come to believe that the balloting in their state to have been flawed. This is legal for most states). All this may end up with Congress as arbiter (if it can) on 20 January, or lead to an unholy melt-down by the Democratic base, if Biden is not inaugurated on that day.

Of course, as we all know, ‘Law’ is never a certain prospect, but even so, what Giuliani’s team is doing – litigation apart – is to curate a public ‘roll-out’ of irregularities, statistical improbabilities and mail-in mess. It seems that Trump and Giuliani will author their own election ‘revisionist history’ (irrespective of litigation outcomes). No doubt this is why Silicon Valley is trying to quash the claim of widespread as opposed to particular fraud. The roll-out at public rallies will almost certainly widen the gulf between one half of America, and the other.

Thirdly, Silicon Valley, with the MSM on its coattails, has clamped-down or shut down sites that allege fraud, labelling them unfounded. But here is the rub: whilst Blue cloaks itself in Progressivism through all this, Silicon Valley may talk the identitarian and gender talk, but ‘Progressive’ it is not.

But here is the rub: whilst Blue cloaks itself in Progressivism through all this, Silicon Valley may talk the identitarian and gender talk – but ‘Progressive’ it is not.

It hews to ‘Davos’: Biden, should he become President, will need moderate Republicans to pass expenditure Bills, much more than he needs the Far-Left caucus of his own party. Wither then, AOC and The Squad? His Administration therefore will be rooted in support for Big Tech and for the ‘Re-set’, which is no more than a re-packaging of old Millenarian universalism.

The bottom line is that Americans live – not only enfolded by their discontents – but also at a significant moment: Red America has awoken to the vitriol directed toward them. And Silicon Valley and the MSM’s onslaught has served to underline their isolation. In crisis, men and women look for explanations – and solutions.

Not for them, collectivist ‘Davos’, we suspect – another in the three long centuries of millenarian, globalist projects, all of which had seemed to promise, at first, a ‘new world’, but which ultimately ended badly. No – more likely what we will see shall be Red ‘libertarianism’ versus Blue ‘collectivism’. Covid-19 lockdowns have sharpened this divide to the point of it becoming icon of that which separates America today.

Today, the US coastal and Euro élites are trying to contain these ‘disorders’ from slipping into violence. These tensions, they fear, threaten the sustainability of the notion of a global humanity grounded in common ‘values’, pursuing an itinerary towards a global order and governance.

Red America – to survive – will reach back to old values (as every society in crisis does), and try to draw out, from the tale of their erosion and neglect, an explication – a story – for their present distress. They can observe that ‘other’ values, opposed to collectivism, always have arisen from within the deep layers of human experience and history.

Many of today’s ‘discontented’ will never before have given much thought to the civilisational values that they will now seek to embrace, and renew. Never mind, that is not the point; the seeds of a new civilisational step will be being set into their collective psyche. We shall see to where it leads.

Psychopaths are a dangerous lot. They lie as easily as they breathe and when they’re not busy gaslighting people they’re hunting for bits of sensitive information to exploit later on. Clinical therapists recommend that the best way to deal with psychopaths is to avoid them.

Yet most people are loath to abandon the little monster that is the smartphone. Particularly denizens of the Beltway. These users would be well advised take a sober look at their mobile devices and acknowledge the true nature of what they’re dealing with. 

The Mighty Wurlitzer Reborn

In the years leading up to World War II the German government launched a campaign to put a low-cost radio in every household. The end result was the “People’s Radio” or Volksempfänger—a government-subsidized receiver which utilized what was then cutting-edge technology to flood the airwaves with propaganda. These little boxes served as the primary interface between the ruling elites and the rest of German society. 

Spies are notorious for disseminating propaganda. The Central Intelligence Agency has a long and storied history of conducting psychological operations (PSYOP). Indeed the agency was so adroit in this domain that one senior official likened its clandestine messaging apparatus to a “Mighty Wurlitzer.” 

In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the United States commenced Operation Earnest Voice, conscripting an army of digital sock puppets to infiltrate social media groups abroad and promote the war on terror. Similar efforts continue to this day with other countries joining the fray. The 2016 presidential election witnessed the handiwork of Russian “active measures,” which employed social media to sow discord in the body politic and, as one report put it, “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process.” 

The underlying playbook isn’t necessarily new. An article in the New Yorker observes that “for half a century, Soviet intelligence backed Western protest movements whose leaders were often unaware that they were benefitting from K.G.B. support.” According to former intelligence officers the basic recipe is as follows: spies identify fault lines, reach out to aggrieved segments of the population, fan the flames, offer material support, justify violence with glittering generalities, and martyr the dead. What’s new is the venue that spies are entering to do so.

Michael Bloomberg’s primary run in 2020 comes to mind. One man’s failed attempt to purchase the presidency flushed approximately half a billion dollars down the pipes. Russian spy chiefs can only dream of that kind of operational budget. And Bloomberg is just one politically active billionaire among dozens in the United States. Robert Mercer invested $15 million to develop social media tools to influence U.S. voters—something to keep in mind when candidates externalize their lack of success on a shadowy third party.

The Thought Police are Here

It’s not just the information which you read that makes a difference, though. It’s also what you don’t read. Sometimes this is a matter of official secrecy, the result of a burgeoning national security complex which is so vast and compartmented that it escapes congressional oversight. Other times vital facts are omitted because media outlets are acting as gatekeepers. Recall how editors at the New York Times knowingly sat on James Risen’s story about NSA surveillance. Possibly a favor to the security establishment that was extended with the expectation of special access later on.

The raging popularity of social media has enabled the major league players of Silicon Valley to rival their forerunners in the press. Big Tech’s approach has been incremental, starting with outliers on the fringe. For example, it goes without saying that Alex Jones is inflammatory and his outlandish beliefs regarding aliens and psychedelic drugs put David Icke to shame. So it may not have raised many eyebrows when he was banned for life from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

But what happens when a larger trend comes into focus? Like when Google was caught developing a censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, for deployment in China. Or when moderators move from Alex Jones to James Woods. Or when Facebook starts banning pages and accounts representing QAnon, a movement which the mainstream press casts as a group of gullible conspiracy theorists.

On a side note, it’s not like there are factual grounds for QAnon’s worldview. What with all the sexual predators among the elites (e.g. Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen). And only a complete idiot would believe that there are insiders who are secretly plotting against the President. So when Netflix openly promotes a movie like “Cuties” there’s absolutely no reason for people to look around and conclude that there might be something to QAnon’s rambling. Right? Whew, what a relief we got that all cleared up.

Taking recent events into consideration, there have been clams of widespread ideological bias. These are difficult to verify because scientifically rigorous data on censorship is rare, limiting public knowledge to a series of anecdotal cases rather than a broader systemic analysis. Furthermore, the nuts and bolts of the automated algorithms and human processes leveraged by Big Tech are confidential. All of this makes allegations of partiality worthy of official investigation.

Big Brother is Watching You Watch

Due to their versatility, smartphones are incredible tracking devices. They generate a wide range of location data that’s derived from sources like GPS, Wi-Fi access points, infrared sensors, Bluetooth beacons, and cellular carrier networks. Everywhere these devices go, they’re quietly interacting with their environment, leaving a trail of legally admissible forensic evidence—even in cases where people mistakenly believe that they can disable it.

Silicon Valley claims that they only want to allow companies to show you ads, but the police certainly seem to have a healthy interest in this kind of information—especially during periods of civil unrest. 

And it’s not just data that smartphones transmit to their surroundings. Over time, as personal data accumulates, smartphones become a deep reservoir of sensitive information: photographs, video footage, email, instant messaging, and cloud storage credentials, just to name a few. Combine this with the aforementioned tracking capabilities and it’s no surprise that smartphones are prized as intelligence targets.   

Even in the paranoid scenario of a one-time burner phone activated out in the boonies, voice recognition software is now standard fare amongst intelligence services. The NSA used this technology to hunt Saddam Hussein. They’ve had almost two decades since then to perfect their arsenal. Ergo the simple act of speaking on a telephone may be enough to compromise security, which may explain the rising popularity of encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, Signal, and WhatsApp. 

Sadly, what people don’t understand is that these well-known “secure” messaging applications have a ten-story bullseye plastered on them, and spies have already made substantial progress towards defeating them. For instance, researchers have found that service providers can surreptitiously add new users into private messaging groups. These invisible guests can then eavesdrop on the group’s “secure” messages, rendering encryption useless. 

You may be thinking: “But companies like Apple wouldn’t cooperate, would they?” In light of the NSA’s Prism program it would be naïve to presume that somehow clandestine assistance and spymaster bonhomie magically ground to a halt. The C-suites are well aware of what happened to Lavabit. 

Using malware is another technique which has been applied with ample success, both by the American intelligence community and foreign security services. It’s so popular that an entire industry has emerged to cater to the market demand for commercial hacking tools. Your author can attest to this. Once spies have a foothold on your phone they can do whatever they want, whether data is encrypted or not. If spies want access, they’ll get it. So, “Is this smart phone secure?” is the wrong question. The correct one is, “Which set of intelligence agencies have access?” 

Do Not Touch or Approach the Glass

The evangelists of Silicon Valley like to market technology as a means of liberation—a lucrative Ponzi scheme where every problem that technology creates must be solved with ever more technology. Sadly, recent history demonstrates that technology has proven to be far more effective as a means of control. Entire geographic regions are now subject to the authoritarian tools that prophets like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley warned about, leading to a future where everyone carries a pocket-sized telescreen.

Clearly the utility of smartphones is a lure. Just like Hannibal Lecter, these blobs of metal and plastic find novel ways to make themselves useful while they silently steal our autonomy and pursue ulterior motives. Honestly, one can only marvel at the sheer cunning of a sales pitch which convinces iPhone “zombies” to literally pay for their own surveillance and indoctrination. The contrarians who elect to place liberty above convenience will need to tread carefully. In a brave new world of thought crime and newspeak, here there be monsters.

theamericanconservative.com

Silicon Valley oligarchs are ushering in a new age of serfdom, aided by the left.

Jorge GONZÁLEZ-GALLARZA

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, by Joel Kotkin, (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 224 pages.

Few policy items have more ominously heralded the ongoing realignment of our politics than Universal Basic Income. That its proponents and detractors can’t seem to agree on what UBI is intended for in the first place is merely a measure of that omen.

Take Spain. The country’s far-left government was an early fan of the policy, and when it leaped on the unemployment caused by lockdowns to implement a version of it, the handouts were popularly mocked as la paguita—Spanish for pocket money. The derisive analogy was swiftly censured as xenophobic—the potential pull effect for illegal migrants deemed a red herring—or more creatively still, as aporophobic, a made-in-Spain woke neologism for aversion towards the poor. Yet it was fresh college graduates, not illegal aliens nor the destitute, that users of la paguita fretted UBI would put on the dole. UBI-skeptics fear this more than any potential loopholes for migrants or layabouts: namely, further untethering the over-credentialed young from the demands of the labor market, directing them instead towards “more creative pursuits” of dubious societal interest while turning the self-sufficient lower-middle classes into their unconsenting patrons.

The dissonance over who exactly UBI is meant to assist is extremely revealing. The policy was initially designed in Silicon Valley to make automation painless, but liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have hailed the insurance it provides against labor market disruptions. The reckoning with the need for a larger safety net is actually widespread, but the unalloyed welfare that UBI would afford entitled millennials remains a no-go across much of the right. By embracing UBI, the left seems to have made peace with our tech-induced drift away from self-sufficiency and towards generalized dependence. But creating a dependent class out of the supposedly “best and brightest” is still deemed profoundly perverse on the right.

This realignment around work and welfare is but one instance of what Joel Kotkin describes in his latest book as The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, the surreptitious supplanting of liberal capitalism—a blend of economic opportunity, pluralism and dispersed political power—with a new regime dominated by tech oligarchs, enabled by their legitimizers in the so-called “progressive clerisy,” and so far acquiesced to by most everyone else. The proposition that a class of tech overlords is infiltrating liberal institutions will sound far-fetched to most of Kotkin’s readers, but that’s only because our connotations of “feudalism” suffer from recency bias. This f-word often calls to mind pre-revolutionary France, where a monarchic nobility and a conservative priesthood united to preserve their privileges at swords’ point until 1789.

That late form of feudalism is displayed in Kotkin’s choice of cover—an engraving of a nobleman and a priest riding a peasant’s back printed two months before the storming of the Bastille. But what the book warns about is feudalism at an embryonic stage, one where the interests of nobility and clerisy may not jibe all the time, and where the third estate’s submission is still unknowing. Similarly, it took centuries after Rome fell for medieval feudalism to fully take shape, with the Church emerging first as a check on kings’ earthly power before becoming their geopolitical ally, and the servants toiling in the rural estates of the post-Roman nobility barely conscious of their evolving towards serfdom. Then as now, Kotkin argues our feudalization is slow but steady, with ever more power concentrating among fewer hands. Kotkin is better known as an urbanist than as a historian, which is precisely how he garners the historical savvy and prescience to discern the trend stealthily unfolding—for unlike in the early Middle Ages, cities and not rural areas are the microcosm of the neo-feudal order.

Big tech CEOs and the “progressive intelligentsia” form an unlikely coalition, corporate power being a classic progressive gripe. So what about today’s tech overlords makes them more palatable than the bankers and utility oligopolists they’ve replaced? Hipness and woke capitalism surely play a part, but their primary appeal to the wider society is in Kotkin’s view technical, grounded in the growing premium our economy places in technological skill. More than a technocracy, this is a technocratic ratchet—the techies hold the keys to an economy they’ve ushered in and keep making more complex. Progressive opinion-makers have largely acquiesced to the concentration of productive know-how in ever fewer hands, even as the less affluent are shut out of the pathways towards acquiring it. Worse still, the societal benefits from technological innovation reaped by everyone else keep diminishing—where innovation was once concerned with productivity, transport or housing, its link with improved living standards has all but broken under society’s hype over social media and artificial intelligence.

Atop the neo-feudal order sit these two powerful blocks, and the economic disruption their alliance portends is correspondingly far-reaching, not limited to a single set of policy wins for tech companies. Even if their tax evasion or greedy data collection practices are reined in with transnational digital taxes and ambitious privacy rules, for big tech these will amount to little more than inches on the margin, mere bumps on the road towards neo-feudalism. To work out the contours of the new economic order, Kotkin proposes instead to size up the larger tenets of liberal capitalism undergoing erosion. This starts with property, the ladder through which a majority could once reach middle-class prosperity but that is being pulled up before our very eyes.

Under feudalism, serfdom was the norm—toiling on the land of someone else who robbed you was the only path to subsist. Similarly, as the clustering effects of today’s knowledge economy keep driving capital and labor towards already cramped cities, property has concentrated in ever fewer hands, with home renters left similarly property-less. Cities used to be hotbeds of opportunity, today they are segregated dystopias. Where strivers could once take jobs that afforded spacey homes, amenities and savings, today the squeezed middle is driven out of cities altogether by skyrocketing housing, transport and childcare costs. Where suburbia once stood to pick up the pieces of our urban dysfunctions, today that last redoubt of the property-owning middle is reaching full capacity in turn, with the comfortable lifestyle it affords shunned by the environmentalist clerisy.

This crisis of property is behind the mantra that “today’s young are the first generation to face dimmer prospects than their parents,” borne out in endless surveys. A married couple of first-generation college graduates today struggles to buy a home even at the age their non-college educated parents did, effectively delaying the age at which the upward mobility both generations worked so hard to chase can take its effect. Even as it remains the only real launchpad to wealth accrual, homeownership is increasingly the monopoly of those lucky to inherit it, which further tilts a playing field at birth already more uneven than ever. And all this concerns only what Kotkin calls the modern “yeomanry” of financially insecure but credentialed professionals. Even grimmer are the prospects of the neo-feudal serfdom, that netherworld of low-skilled jobs in the service precariat. Devoid of technical skills, these neo-serfs live paycheck to paycheck in what former Labor Secretary Robert Reich once called the “share-the-scraps-economy”—a wordplay on the “sharing economy”—with not a whiff of any real economic opportunity.

But just like medieval serfs felt bound to the feudal system through the Christian hope of redemption, so is our neo-feudal order held together, as much as by economic relationships, by the cultural values evangelized from the clerisy downwards. Yesteryear’s societal ethos was one of dynamism, creative destruction and widespread opportunity for all, which, when sincerely embraced by those at the top, gave the entire system a buttress of legitimacy. For the managerial class holding the reins, living out these values and leading by example reinforced their position atop the system—creating jobs meant supporting middle-class livelihoods, reneging from corporate welfare and accepting the diktats of antitrust enforcement meant playing by the rules.

The values underpinning today’s neo-feudalism, rather than allowing for elites to be renewed through competition and merit, serve to entrench the ones we’re stuck with. Pluralism in online discourse is on the way out and any talk of breaking up the tech giants is defamed as antitrust heresy, effectively enshrining their natural monopoly over the digital space. As for philanthropy, today’s tech overlords truly see their lot as the kindest hearted in society, but their foundations no longer seek to align status with merit but to refashion our political economy entirely by normalizing dependence. UBI is to philanthropy what giving away fish is to fishing education.

Whenever economic opportunity is invoked by big tech’s allies in the clerisy, it is most often in the discourse of identity politics, which derives policy prescriptions that fail to create more of it, resorting instead to shoving ethnic minorities amidst the ranks of the technocracy. Instead of expanding access to high-quality education, vocational training or urban property, the siren song of identititarianism calls for numerical quotas and affirmative action. If anything, economic opportunity stands to lose even more ground if the shibboleths promoted from atop are pursued à la lettre, to the extent they pose further penalties on the less fortunate, such as through environmentalism or multiculturalism. And this is where policies such as UBI come back into the picture—their aim is to make the lack of economic opportunity less painful and politically costly, not to reverse our direction of travel towards neo-feudalism. Evangelized with the brimstone of religion, these values are ushering in a new regime of what Kotkin calls “oligarchic socialism,” with productive work increasingly the province of a fortunate few, while everyone is left to battle out for the scraps but numbed with progressive piety.

The alarm Kotkin sounds is all the more courageous and credible coming from an old-school progressive like him, and shows that the left’s realignment around the interests of tech oligarchs and the gospel of wokeism won’t go without internal pushback. Kotkin has even earned an audience on the right—the book is published by Encounter. If his Warning to the Global Middle Class is to be heard widely, it will need all the support it can get from conservatives, whom are undergoing a realignment of the kind Kotkin advocates for his own side. Which calls to mind the ominous words of the abbé Sieyès in 1789—“what is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been in the current political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something!”

theamericanconservative.com

There is no need to ask. There is no need to be polite. There is no need to debate. It is only necessary to point to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for this fundamental human right, inscribed into law over 200 years ago, to be returned to the American people.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

So how did it come to be that such a straightforward and unambiguous command has become so unattainable in reality?

The Big Five media conglomerates control 90% of US media (Comcast (via NBCUniversal), Disney, Viacom & CBS (both controlled by National Amusements), and AT&T (via WarnerMedia).

In 1984 there were in the neighborhood of 50 independent media companies.

“Freedom of the press.”

— AntiNarcopathyPharmD (@narceducator) November 14, 2019

The primary source of our current plight is that the Founding Fathers had no idea to what degree corporations would come to dominate every square inch of our public and private lives. Had they been somehow forewarned of the approaching pirates just over the horizon with serious political axes to grind, there is no doubt they would have adjusted the Constitution’s sails to prepare for the invasion. Alas, such farsightedness was far beyond the psychic powers of any individual at the time.

Today, the situation with regards to corporate power has become so out of control that only the ‘person’ of the corporation is truly endowed by its creator with the full power of speech. These omnipotent ‘arbitrators of truth’ – i.e. their truth – are now controlled by five kingdoms (down from its previous six thanks to the marriage between Viacom and CBS) known as Comcast, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Warner Media and ViacomCBS, each one of which has many dozens of obedient subsidiaries under their wing.

Now we must ask: how likely is it for the average American to achieve some semblance of ‘freedom of speech’ from any one of these media powerhouses? While we consumers are all endowed with the ‘inalienable right’ to freely purchase the services from any one of these vast entities, our ability to have our individual voices disseminated from one of their hundreds of various channels is laughable. Aside from the occasional letter to the editor or guest column, the ‘power of the people’ in the face of these corporate overlords is solely that of emasculated passive spectator. This is a fact of life that popular politicians like Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard and their loyal followers have come to learn the hard way.

Every candidate running in 2008 was for the Iraq War…except @RonPaul

He was ignored

No Candidate in 2019 is speaking out against the wars…except @TulsiGabbard

She is being ignored

When it comes to war the media is united.@TulsiPress

— Ozymandias (@DustinDry1st) March 21, 2019

And much like in the political realm, the variety of messages available is deceptively wide and dangerously shallow, while the holy grail of the ‘editorial slant’ is obsessively guarded from any and all apostates. Amid such medieval conditions, the individual who hopes to have his voice heard in the public realm may wish to take the social media route courtesy of Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. Here too our lonely nomad – especially if he is of a more conservative bent – will run headlong into an impenetrable wall known as censorship or being ‘shadow banned’.

Behind the walls of these Silicon Valley fortresses, engineers monkey with algorithms in ways that we mere mortals can only imagine. Yet thanks to a few courageous inside dissenters (here and here), as well as accidental ‘squealers,’ we have managed to catch a glimpse behind the iron curtain. In a nutshell, it provides a less-than-glowing picture that has nothing in common with democratic principles. At the same time, Google, as the primary ‘arbitrator of truth’ these days, has taken it upon itself to literally rewrite the history books according to the gospel of liberalism. If you don’t believe it, just do a Google search on ‘White American inventors’ and that will tell you everything you need to know.

The two companies with the biggest internal social media platforms for their employees (Google and Facebook) also have massive employee turmoil… Anyone surprised?

— James Damore (@JamesADamore) April 9, 2019

These infinitely powerful IT companies, which have partnered up with notoriously biased, anti-conservative organizations, like the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center, have no business censoring their users. These platforms, protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, are designed as vehicles for posting ideas, however wild or even conspiratorial they may appear to some observers. In other words, the platforms are not traditional publishers in the sense that they are legally responsible for the content that appears on their sites. In the event that they ban or alter the meaning of the content, they are liable to lose the protections they have been granted under Section 230. So long as the user of the platform is not calling for violence, their views, according to the First Amendment, have every right to be heard.

Those privileges enjoyed by the social media titans were called into question this week when none other than President Donald Trump had his social media posts challenged by Twitter – twice.

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 26, 2020

The U.S. leader wrote on Twitter to his 80 million followers, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed….” to which Twitter attached a memorandum below the message advising readers to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” with a link that ‘debunked’ what Trump had written.

On May 29, as protests against the death of George Floyd began to spiral out of control, Trump warned in a tweet that “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter on this occasion took the unprecedented step of hiding his tweet behind a message that accused Trump of “glorifying violence.”

This should be a wake-up call to all Americans – especially as millions of people are struggling to get accurate information on the coronavirus, as well as spreading riots – that if the U.S. president is having trouble securing his freedom of speech, the chances for the average person is practically nonexistent.

Although Trump has moved to lift the protections that the social media behemoths now enjoy, it remains to be seen whether that action will improve the chances for freedom of speech in the land of liberty, or just drive it further underground. Whatever the case may be, the prospects do not look promising for the First Amendment, and therein lies the worst crisis facing the American people today.

June 2019 may go down in the history books as the defining moment when the American IT giants – in cahoots with the limping ‘legacy’ media – removed their masks, as well as their gloves, revealing the real threat they have become to the institution of US democracy, fragile as it already is.

The New York Times got the ball rolling when it ran a front-page story (‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’) detailing the trials and tribulations of one tortured Caleb Cain, a college dropout who was “looking for direction” in life but instead tumbled headlong into a rabbit hole of “far-right politics on YouTube” where he eventually found himself “brainwashed” and “radicalized.”

The article, quoting “critics and independent researchers,” which I suppose could mean just about anyone, says the Google-owned platform has created “a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining … a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens.”

Some people would call that the very same business model that keeps the wheels of capitalism rolling: Keep the product hot and spicy so that the consumer comes back for more. The so-called “alt-right,” however, is not serving up extremist beliefs or Nazi ideology to attract viewers, as the New York Times claims, but rather coherent arguments that challenge the tenets of modern Liberal thinking. It may shock a lot of people, but a person does not have to be a Neo-Nazi to want strong national borders, for example, and laws that prohibit children from being taught about transgender lifestyles in grade school. Yet that is exactly how the right-leaning creators are being portrayed. And it is worth noting that these conservative ‘citizen journalists’ are doing a much better job at attracting audiences than the mainstream media, which is hemorrhaging both viewers and profits.

At the same time, the Times’ article assumes many things about YouTube users, none of which are remotely flattering. First, customers of the video platform, according to the Times, lack any sort of free will and independence. Thus, when a video appears in the recommendation box the user – not unlike a helpless heroin addict – will automatically press ‘play’, thereby involuntarily becoming subjected to yet another right-wing indoctrination session. Soon enough there’s a veritable vegetable sitting in front of the computer, helpless to pull itself away from the recommended video selections.

The article also assumes, with amazing naiveté, that people could not have had uneasy feelings about some issue until a crafty content creator came along and presented it to them. That is simply absurd. Such assumptions infantilize the user, making him appear incapable of making rational judgments on everyday social and political issues. The real reason, of course, that many users find a particular video on a particular subject is because they had been searching for answers to the very questions presented. Nevertheless, it is necessary, Google believes, that these YouTube creators be demonetized and banished from the platform, lest the unsuspecting user fall prey to their dastardly ways and radicalize an entire generation to loathe open borders, marijuana, abortion, transgender lifestyles, and any other controversial issue that is dear to the heart of Liberals.

But the Times hit piece was not the only whiff of grapeshot to grab the headlines. YouTube also demonstrated that it will swiftly move to defend other social media giants when it removed a video by the undercover investigative group, Project Veritas, that showed how Pinterest suppressed conservative talking points.

James O’Keefe, Project Veritas founder, slammed YouTube’s decision in a statement posted on Twitter.

“The established media and technology are so afraid of investigative journalism they need to censor it. YouTube calls REPORTING on someone by showing their face and name, and how they added a pro-life group to a porn blacklist, a ‘privacy complaint.’ Would they do this to NYT?” he wrote.

So here we have a situation where the largest American social media companies are able to shame and ban users with impunity, while also deleting efforts by any outside agency that demonstrates their political bias.

This leads us to the crux of the matter: As the social media companies hide behind their ‘private’ corporate status in order to curb political speech on their platforms with total impunity, they are exerting, at the very same time, powerful influence on the political process. In other words, they are empowered to do the very thing that many of their platform users are not, and that is to support their political convictions without fear of reprisal, banning and censorship. They want to have their private cake and eat it too.

Needless to say, such hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the social media behemoths cannot continue in the so-called ‘land of the free.’ And with US presidential elections approaching in 2020, tensions over such arbitrary power by the social media companies will only intensify when the people come to understand their voices are being silenced. The situation may get bad enough that the question of social media freedoms will even be heard on the debate floor during the campaigns. At least we can dream; it seems to be all we have left these days.