Tag: PSYOP

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First Amendment rights media and media people political challengers social media

The Ignorance of Censorship

Covid, censorship, surveillance, PSYOP, mind control

Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?

Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-​election campaign.

A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.

And in those days (as in these), all-​out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-​19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.

Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House … to censor certain COVID-​19 content”?

The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”

The single COVID-​contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-​media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-​pressured social-​media companies?

Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights too much government

Deep State in a Corner

deep state, censorship, mind control, PSYOP, CIA

Once upon a time, the CIA and allied agencies pushed free speech as a norm. 

Overseas.

The rationale? Without some free speech and press rights, it was too hard to organize a populace to overthrow their government. Our spooks exported freedom of speech abroad not because they were so gung-​ho American; it was all about seeding revolutions.

But not here! 

The CIA couldn’t let others take advantage of American free speech like its agents leveraged free speech abroad. A change in government might mean … loss of jobs. Mission. Money.

What to do? Disinform at home. By corrupting journalism.

The Operation Mockingbird efforts in the 1960s helped intel insiders control information and manage “the consent of the governed,” and these early efforts grew into the close ties between the Deep State and credentialed journalists today. 

The connections, I’m told are many: it’s not just Anderson Cooper’s internship at the CIA. 

During the Cold War, the disinformation element found a plausible justification. Then, the Soviets had us at a disadvantage: we had trouble extracting reliable information from within the Iron Curtain, but they could grab all sorts of useful information from our open, comparatively free speech realm.

Disinformation: a strategic necessity. But the consequences?

 “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete,” William Casey explained to President Ronald Reagan, “when everything the American public believes is false.”

In the early days of the Internet, the Deep State pushed online speech platforms, the better to allow for foreign coups. Is there a social media space that hasn’t received surreptitious government subsidy? It’s hard to be sure. We’re supposed to assume our government protects us rather than controls us. 

But, increasingly, Internet-​connected Americans see government officials chiefly as manipulators.

Which is why the Deep State’s most ardent partisans (neocons; Democrats; plutocrats) now routinely attack free speech here, and why allies overseas are so thoroughly cracking down on “de-​stabilizing” opinions. It’s why Rumble is no longer available in Brazil and why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel … and why France has arrested the CEO of Telegram.

Us catching on to the psy-​op game places the Deep State in a corner. All the disinformation agents have left is censorship and repression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Measures of Desperation

news media, bias, propaganda, PSYOP

Desperate times call for desperate measures, the saying goes, but since the Hillary Clinton/​Donald Trump contest of 2015 – 2016, the desperate measures that Democrats and media newsfolk lurched towards have been extraordinary.

Yesterday, as one of our Weekend Updates, we considered the current pickle in which the corporate news media finds itself. 

Fearing that they had contributed to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by covering the news of her emails and other scandals, corporate newsrooms cooked up a new ethical rule: Do not report on stories based on data — no matter if confirmed — that may have been leaked by foreign malefactors, such as “the Russians.”

With that rule they suppressed, online, news about the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents, calling it “Russian disinformation.” Twitter banned the news source long enough to get Biden elected, and then the “Russian” story unraveled.

Now that same rule would, if consistently applied, work against reporting on Trump’s current email leakage.

But it’s not just media malfeasance that is desperate, as Stephen Cox explains at Liberty. Referring to the ousting of Joe Biden from the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Cox writes that while this variety of machination is new to America, it is very old, historically: this is “the kind of thing the Roman imperial families used to do. This is the kind of thing the Bolsheviks used to do. The difference, of course, is that the Democratic Party oligarchs have lots and lots of money to enforce their will.”

Enforce it they do. Consider how many in the news media played along with Biden’s senescence, right up until they all proclaimed it obvious and disqualifying. They “turn on a dime.”

“Fragile regimes have a way of bringing the house down with them,” notes Cox. But why is it Trump who sends Democrats into paroxysms of terror?

Twenty years ago, Trump might have been dismissed out of hand. He isn’t now, and neither is Kamala Harris — a woman with all the charm of Hillary and all the competence of Sleepy Joe.

Desperate times, indeed. And Americans know it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs national politics & policies

TikTok Smoke But No Gun?

China, Tik Tok, social media, brainwashing, PSYOP, spying

I’d like to ban the Communist Party — in China. But TikTok — here?

The app’s possible use as spyware and worse by Chinese Communist Party operatives should be investigated thoroughly.

“Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government,” explains The New York Times. “They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-​gathering operations.”

This concerns me enough to not be on TikTok, but while we smell smoke, I see no smoking gun.

And banning Tik Tok has every appearance of doing what the CCP would do — and did with Facebook and YouTube and X (formerly known as Prince — er, Twitter). Not to mention being unconstitutional.

The TikTok ban that passed the House last week — with only 50 Democrats and 15 Republicans voting No — if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would set up another level of surveillance and Internet control that would be used against American citizens beyond users of this social media video-​sharing platform.

It comes down to good ends not justifying evil means, in this case an all-​out government attack upon freedom of speech and press.

There are things the federal government could do — and already has done — to limit TikTok’s influence. Last year, the U.S. (along with Canada) banned it from all government devices. 

This didn’t even require an act of Congress. Arguably, Trump could have done this with Facebook and Twitter on federal government devices when it became clear that these platforms were being used to orchestrate partisan speech control.

And, of course, a general social cause against TikTok could be engaged without threat of force. Political leaders owe it to the people to speak out.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Package Deal

Tik Tok, app, China, censorship

Suppose suggested legislation outlaws both murder and walking. How could you oppose it? Are you, a dedicated perambulator-​peripatetic, also a murder-supporter?

Obviously, this would be an attempt to foist a package deal consisting of unrelated or mutually contradictory elements.

Consider a more true-​to-​life example.

In the Wall Street Journal, Philip Hamburger argues that a congressional bill targeting TikTok would do much more than counter Chinazi spying on Americans (“The TikTok Bill Is a Sneak Attack on Free Speech”).

If curbing or even outlawing TikTok were the sole focus, one could argue the merits of the legislation given what is known about the company’s collecting of data and its relationship with the Chinese government. There’s no free-​speech protection of foreign espionage.

However, as Hamburger points out, the bill gives the federal government “sweeping power over communications” and could be used to stifle speech protected by the Constitution.

The proposed statute would allow the Department of Commerce to undertake open-​ended mitigation of “undue or unacceptable” risk regarded as arising from use of communications technology in which any entity subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary “has any interest.”

This is very vague and very all-​encompassing. The legislation thus confers power over domestic communication companies “that could be used to extort their cooperation in censorship.”

Attempts to resist such “mitigation” or censorship would risk administrative fines of $250,000, criminal penalties of $1 million, two decades in prison. For supporting freedom of speech?

Please walk away from this, Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people

X Lives Matter

mind control, PSYOP

I don’t usually comment on fashion. But at a recent show in Paris, this rather famous rapper who calls himself Ye but who used to call himself Kanye West sported newly designed black-​and-​white T‑shirts with the slogan “White Lives Matter” on the back. Squarely in the territory of ideological fashion, I can comment without too much embarrassment.

There was some furor. 

It is unfashionable, politically, for anyone — even a black man, or especially a famous black man — to admit the obvious truth that “White Lives Matter.”

It appears that chic faux-lib’rals regard the slogan “Black Lives Matter” as some sort of trademark that precludes extension to other races. Only people of color may use an “X Lives Matter” kind of branding.

Idiotic. And racist. But ABC News laid out the case as if it were clearly established truth: “The [White Lives Matter] phrase has been described by the Anti-​Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist hate slogan that originated in 2015 as a racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.”

And yet a statement like “White Lives Matter” or “Human Lives Matter” can only be hate speech if you think one usage defines words forever.

Which of course is precisely what some are trying to establish here.

Why? Well, the better to engage in angry, hateful ideological pseudo-​discourse: shaming; marginalizing; de-humanizing.

Ye also posed with Candace Owens, a conservative commentator for The Daily Wire, wearing those shirts, and that, too, really annoyed people.

Not that it should. Ye was once married to a white woman, and Candace is married to a white man. They are making a commonsense point here: if you can’t say your spouse matters, what kind of spouse are you? And if you cannot extrapolate that mattering principle more generally, what kind of human are you?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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