On Sunday the offices of Al Jazeera in Jerusalem were raided by Israeli police, after the Knesset voted unanimously voted to ban the Qatar-based news network.
The Israeli order effectively shuts down all Al Jazeera broadcasts in Israel and the West Bank. To implement the ban, authorities confiscated equipment at the channel’s Jerusalem HQ inside the Ambassador Hotel.
Additionally Israel will block Al Jazeera’s website after PM Netanyahu alleged that it is a “Hamas mouthpiece.” He has further claimed that the outlet’s coverage of Gaza has put Israeli troops in danger.
“Al Jazeera reporters harmed Israel’s security and incited against soldiers,” Netanyahu said previously. He has for weeks been mounting a public campaign against it.
Al Jazeera has responded by calling the claim a “dangerous and ridiculous lie” and further said “pursue every legal step” to fight being shut down by Israel.
Interestingly, last year the Biden administration also began complaining about the channel’s coverage, with an October Axiosreport saying that Secretary of State Antony Blinken requested that the Qataris “turn down the volume on Al Jazeera’s coverage because it is full of anti-Israel incitement.”
The outlet has said in a statement, “Israel’s ongoing suppression of the free press, seen as an effort to conceal its actions in the Gaza Strip, stands in contravention of international and humanitarian law.”
Israel’s legislative body, the Knesset, passed a measure last month that empowers Israel’s communications minister to take action against any foreign media network that it can prove poses a national security risk.
The law gives senior government officials power to temporarily shutter foreign news networks on national security grounds for at least 45 days, but that period can be extended.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The neocon faction of the permanent ruling class, which permeates both parties, is eternally dangerous and must be perpetually kept in check, if not purged entirely.
The year was 2006, in the middle of a decade that cemented my hate for the state, probably forever.
The terror induced by government’s War of Terror propaganda was at its apex.
Jingoistic “Freedom Fries” were on offer at various patriotic establishment because “French fries” were faggy and soft.
The neocons had their guy, literally minus a beating heart, Dick Cheney, strategically placed as the real president, playing his moronic nominal boss like a fiddle.
The PATRIOT Act was in full effect and American civil liberties had never been more broken — although they would be in subsequent years.
And one Newt Gingrich, the viscerally repulsive, bloated embodiment of the rot in the overfed GOP establishment, wanted to censor the internet… because ‘Merica.
It went without saying at the time that, if you oppose state control of the web, you support terrorism.
In order to defend America, once must undermine all of the fundamental founding principles that made it great in the first place.
“Back in 2006, Gingrich argued censoring the Internet would be the right thing to do when it comes to Islamic radicals who use the web to organize jihad against the U.S.
‘We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we’re unfortunate,’ Mr. Gingrich said during a speech in New Hampshire, according to a story I wrote at the time for The New York Sun. ‘We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren’t for the scale of the threat.’…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The concept of the Overton window caught on in professional culture, particularly those seeking to nudge public opinion, because it taps into a certain sense that we all know is there.
There are things you can say and things you cannot say, not because there are speech controls (though there are) but because holding certain views makes you anathema and dismissable. This leads to less influence and effectiveness.
The Overton window is a way of mapping sayable opinions.
The goal of advocacy is to stay within the window while moving it just ever so much. For example, if you’re writing about monetary policy, you should say that the Fed should not immediately reduce rates for fear of igniting inflation.
You can really think that the Fed should be abolished but saying that is inconsistent with the demands of polite society. That’s only one example of a million.
To notice and comply with the Overton window is not the same as merely favoring incremental change over dramatic reform. There is not and should never be an issue with marginal change.
That’s not what’s at stake.
To be aware of the Overton window, and fit within it, means to curate your own advocacy. You should do so in a way that’s designed to comply with a structure of opinion that’s pre-existing as a kind of template we’re all given.
It means to craft a strategy specifically designed to game the system, which is said to operate according to acceptable and unacceptable opinionizing.
In every area of social, economic and political life, we find a form of compliance with strategic considerations seemingly dictated by this window. There’s no sense in spouting off opinions that offend or trigger people because they’ll just dismiss you as not credible.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s latest push for stringent internet censorship will continue to spark debate over free speech.
Following his more recent online censorship demands, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is doubling down and has advocated for more stringent controls on what is labeled as “misogynistic” online content. This initiative comes as plans are set for a national cabinet session in 2024 focused on women’s safety, which will address online harassment, among other issues.
This move marks another significant focus by the government, ostensibly on enhancing women’s safety, but raising alarms about potential overreach in curtailing free speech, as its other speech-related policies have done.
“Young adults should not be coached in disrespect or misogyny by online influencers,” Prime Minister Albanese said.
“I understand parents want to protect their kids from harmful material online,” Albanese added. “Social platforms have important social responsibilities and we need them to step up. Taken together, these reforms will give Australian families some of the tools they need to navigate the complexity of the digital world.”
The Prime Minister added that the legislation would carry “serious criminal penalties.”
The proposed measures include better tracking and monitoring the speech of those considered high-risk or repeat offenders and a drive to significantly reduce the presence of misogynistic content on social media platforms.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has expressed concern about the widespread dissemination of such content, particularly its impact on young users of social media. “The reality is that digital platforms are influencing our culture and social lives. They have a responsibility to do more to meet community standards,” Rowland said.
However, critics argue that the measures could infringe on digital rights and free expression, especially given the opaque nature of the algorithms that determine content dissemination.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Brazil’s Attorney General and Supreme Federal Court are exploring drastic measures after getting called out for censorship demands.
According to reports out of Brazil, the country’s attorney general, Jorge Messias, and the Supreme Federal Court (STF) are trying to find a way to shut down X in that country.
The Gazeta do Povo newspaper says that it has had exclusive access to a 10-page document that Messias earlier this week sent to Alexandre de Moraes, an STF justice and president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), asking STF to suspend or completely shut down X, if there is proof that the company “prejudiced” STF and TSE investigations.
Messias also wants Moraes to share with his office any evidence from the ongoing investigation into X owner Elon Musk’s conduct, who is suspected of “obstruction of justice.”
And now a new, internal probe is being prepared by the attorney general regarding the alleged leak of confidential information from investigations conducted by Moraes, published as part of the Twitter Files.
This information, the newspaper said, concerns pressure exerted on X executives to censor accounts belonging to Brazilians. It was to support this investigation that Messias requested more evidence from Moraes.
Now, the X executives are considered to be criminally liable, while Messias thinks X’s Brazil branch, X Brasil Internet, should be treated as an entity involved in a harmful act “hindering the investigation or supervision of public bodies, entities or agents, or intervening in their activities.”
If proven, the fine would amount to 20% of revenue, however, Messias told Moraes that the punishment could be made much more severe. The AG then proceeded to quote the opinion of an internal department with his own office, that said a law would allow the authorities to go as far as suspend X or dissolve the local company.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Millions of dollars were spent to weaponize the public against all of us
Story at a Glance:
•There has been a coordinated campaign to attack and defame anyone who has spoken out against the COVID-19 response. This has primarily been restricted to social media (e.g., getting people deplatformed) but it has also been weaponized in real life (e.g., getting medical licenses revoked).
•This coordinated campaign was the result of a “non-profit” known as The Public Good Project (PGP), which was actually directly linked to the pharmaceutical industry. The PGP used the industry funding it received to defend industry interests.
•Vaccine safety advocates were able to get into the group where these campaigns were coordinated. There, they discovered numerous public figures working hand in hand with healthcare workers to descend like a hive of bees on anyone “promoting misinformation.” Likewise, we learned that the most belligerent doctors we keep encountering on Twitter belonged to these groups.
•Some of the influencers advancing PGP’s message through “Shots Heard” (and its sister United Nations initiative “Team Halo”) were hucksters who faked their own credentials. My overall impression from looking at everything was that this group operated in a very similar manner to many of the sleazy internet marketing operations I’ve seen in the past. Fortunately, the public appears to be seeing through what they did.
Almost any viewpoint can be “proven” using the “correct” evidence and logic. Purely as a challenge, I’ve successfully done this in the past with beliefs I consider to be abhorrent and completely disagree with…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
One of the first posts in this newsletter’s Shrinking Trust Horizon series was about how “deep fake” technology will make fake images, videos, and audio recordings almost indistinguishable from the real thing. This will kill millions of modeling and acting jobs, while weaponizing audio and video in all kinds of disturbing ways.
A Maryland high school teacher has been arrested for allegedly using AI to deepfake a bogus recording of his principal making racist comments.
Dazhon Darien, 31, is accused of creating the hoax audio of Pikesville High School Principal Eric Eiswert.
Mr Eiswert was placed on leave and had police outside his home amid death threats he received over the fake clip.
Mr Darien was held at an airport after a security check over a gun in his bag found an arrest warrant against him.
He faces charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness.
Baltimore County Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers said the school, as well as the Baltimore County Police Department, launched an investigation on 17 January when they were made aware of the voice recording.
Detectives requested a forensic analysis of the audio, which found it was not authentic.
In the recording, Mr Eiswert’s deepfaked voice is heard making disparaging comments about black students’ test scores, black teachers and Jews.
Police believe Mr Darien, the Baltimore-area school’s athletic director, made the recording to retaliate against Mr Eiswert because he was pursuing an investigation into potential mishandling of district funds.
Mr Darien had authorised a payment of nearly $2,000 (£1,600) to his roommate, falsely claiming the roommate was an assistant coach for the Pikesville girls’ soccer team, reports the Baltimore Sun newspaper.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Do you remember how the unconstitutional, pastel-authoritarian and totally batshit insane “Disinformation Governance Board” – with its Mary Poppins-cosplaying, Monty Python level of unintentional self-satirizing department head – was rolled out two years ago like a half-joke, half-beta-test of a version of the 1984 Ministry of Truth?
Well, kids, I wouldn’t really call this 4D chess or anything, but of course this was just bait. This parody and its rapid withdrawal reassures us that nothing of the sort could conceivably take place, while also seeding a visible, red-herring template for how we should expect heavy-handed, overt propaganda efforts to look in this day and age.
Meanwhile, there are currently massive efforts in the background and below the surface, all across the playing field, towards implementing big data and AI technology for not only the purposes of classical, increasingly obsolete propaganda or simple surveillance. No, this time, we’re exploring entirely novel methods of behavioural modification and narrative control intended to GET OUT AHEAD of the crystallization of discourses and even the formation of identities and worldviews.
They want to control the formation and reproduction of “social imaginaries”.
So the idea is to use massive data collection and AI pattern recognition to preemptively disrupt the formation of behaviourally significant narratives, discourses or patterns of information.
With these tools of “early diagnosis” of information that potentially could disrupt the power structure and its objectives, it then becomes possible to nip it in the bud incredibly early on, way before such information has even coalesced into something like coherent narratives or meaningful models for explanation or further (precarious) conclusions.
Today’s ‘contemplation’ is derived from a conversation on a Facebook Group post I was recently involved with[1]. I’ve been reluctant to write anything regarding the current Russian/Ukraine conflict due to the extreme polemic and emotional aspects such events create, especially in the early moments when people are reacting rather than reflecting[2], and the propaganda on all sides has been ramped up to warp speed. Nonetheless, here it is:
War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!
So the Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong song goes[3], and this is especially true in times of overshoot given the drain on resources (which have for some time been encountering significant diminishing returns) that modern warfare entails. It is self-evident that military adventurism is heavily resource dependent, and a World War or even a significant increase in a ‘Cold War’ between geopolitical rivals will expedite the coming collapse of our global, industrialised societies as assuredly as a gargantuan ramping up of the industrial processes required to try and replace our fossil fuel-intensive energy needs with non-renewable, renewables[4] that many, even well-intentioned ‘environmentalists’, advocate for[5].
But depending upon one’s perspective, war can be quite good. In fact, fantastic. It is one of the longest lasting means throughout pre/history for a complex society’s ruling elite to maintain and expand power, gain access to resources, and with our current debt-/credit-based fiat currency monetary system and concentration of industrial/corporate ownership ensure gargantuan profits for a select few[6].
Many in the West have jumped upon the patriotic bandwagon to vilify Russian/Putin ‘aggression’ (conveniently ignoring/denying the ongoing aggression of their own elite over the years). This is not surprising given the slanted narratives they are provided by our politicians and their media mouthpieces on a regular basis to garner our support[7]. We are fed lies constantly through both omission and commission. Propaganda is everywhere, all the time[8].
There is a very good argument to be made (based upon history and context) that it has been the West’s ever-expanding encroachment towards Russian borders that has precipitated much of this[9]; to say little about the US-orchestrated coup[10] that led to the current West-leaning Ukrainian regime. And, quite naturally, there has been a full court press on to counter these arguments from US/NATO advocates[11]. The idea that it is unpatriotic to criticise or counter war ‘efforts’ is rampant. The ‘you are with us or against us’ mentality is everywhere. Of course it is nothing new to leverage our ‘natural’ tendency (what some refer to as tribal instincts) of patriotic feelings towards our nation state and her allies; it occurs both in and out of war time[12].
Is Russia innocent in any of this? Absolutely not; they are a nation-state based upon a ruling elite whose primary motivation is the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems to maintain their revenue streams and power/prestige like every other. The West’s elite (who are driven by the same motivation) have challenged the East’s elite and many innocents (the vast majority of the rest of us) are caught in the middle of this power play.
These people don’t give a shit about you or me except in terms of extracting labour and wealth to support them. But on some level they also need our consent to participate in such actions given how significantly outnumbered they are. This consent is, for the most part, manufactured by leveraging our fear of the ‘other’ and our sense of ‘patriotism’ — in this vein, we are sold all sorts of emotional narratives about ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’, ‘duty’, ‘evil’, ‘tyranny’, etc..
It’s all bullshit but because of our tendency to defer to authority[13] and to identify with the elite we imagine it is ‘us’, the ‘average person’, that the ‘other’ hates and wants to fight[14]. We end up standing with our elite ruling class and support/cheerlead their pillaging of the nation’s treasury (both ‘wealth’ and natural resources) to engage in war…while it is them who are profiting given they own the industries and financial institutions that have to provide the ‘loans’ and armaments. It’s all based on lies and manipulation. It is a racket, plain and simple, just as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler argued[15].
In the meantime, it pushes us further into overshoot through its significant resource drawdowns and sink overloading — to say little about the environmental impacts should this go nuclear.
The best thing the vast, vast majority of us could do is not choose a ‘side’ but walk away from this insanity by not supporting it at all. Refuse to participate. Refuse to repeat their propaganda. Refuse their lies and manipulation. Don’t be a pawn in their game. Reduce drastically your consumption. Reduce your dependency upon long-distance supply chains. Relocalise as much as possible. Build your community’s self-sufficiency and -resiliency. Grow your own food. Trade with your neighbours. Support each other, not the ruling class whose interests and motivations have nothing to do with you, your family, or your local community (unless of course its sitting on natural resources they want).
Refuse to remain in the Matrix as much as possible.
[2] Not that discussing cornucopian techno-fixes to our dependency upon fossil fuels with some is not — it can be very contentious, especially when one is attacked for being a fossil fuel shill/cheerleader for simply highlighting the problems that arise with alternative energy sources to fossil fuels.
[3] Although originally sung by The Temptations in 1969 and then rerecorded in 1970 featuring Edwin Starr, I personally was introduced to the song during my formative years of the 1980s and know it as a Frankie Goes to Hollywood one.
[4] Non-renewable, renewables is a term I have seen increasingly used by people to describe more accurately our energy harnessing technologies of solar photovoltaic, wind, and wave energy. The natural sources we are attempting to harness energy from are, for all intents and purposes, ‘renewable’ but the technologies used to harness and convert this energy to something humanity can use are not given their reliance upon finite resources, particularly the fossil fuel platform but also the many earth-based minerals that go into the components.
[5] From mining to mineral processing to transportation to reclamation and/or waste disposal, these complex energy-harvesting technologies require much in the way of finite resources and energy inputs, and add significantly to the overloading of our planetary sinks.
Thanks to the internet and (shrinking) press freedoms, legacy media outlets no longer have a monopoly on information and narratives.
Case in point, during a WEF discussion at Davos entitled “Defending Truth,” Wall St. Journal EIC Emma Tucker lamented this loss of control over ‘the facts,’ as Modernity.news reports.
“I think there’s a very specific challenge for the legacy brands, like the New York Times and like the Wall Street Journal,” Tucker said, adding “If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well.”
“If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact,” she continued, adding “Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.”
Watch:
Russia, Russia, Russia!
European Commission VP Věra Jourová also piped up during the same discussion, calling the rise of “disinformation” a “security threat,” and suggesting that “It was part of the Russian military doctrine that they will start information war, and we are in it now.”
Like when the Hillary Clinton campaign used a former (?) British spook’s Russian source to fabricate a hoax against Donald Trump, which was peddled through the Wall Street Journal and every single other legacy media outlet? That kind of information war? Or when 51 former US intelligence officials used disinformation to influence the 2020 election, suggesting the NY Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell was Russian meddling?
“Disinformation is a very powerful tool,” Jourová continued, adding that “In the EU we are focusing on improving of the system where the people will get the facts right. We don’t speak about opinions. We are not correcting anyone’s opinions or language. This is about the facts.”
So, my trial for thoughtcrimes in New Normal Germany takes place next Tuesday, January 23rd. It will likely be a one-day affair. It’s open to the public, so, if you’re in Berlin, you can come and watch at the Berlin District Court, Turmstraße 91, Room 371. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 12:00 noon.
Yes, that’s right, the German authorities are actually putting me on trial for my thoughtcrimes. I stand accused of criminal tweeting because I mocked the New Normal German authorities and pointed out one of their many lies. Here are the two thoughtcrime Tweets at issue.
The one on the left reads, “The masks are ideological-conformity symbols. That is all they are. That is all they have ever been. Stop acting like they have ever been anything else, or get used to wearing them.” The one on the right is a quote by Karl Lauterbach, who, believe it or not, is still the Health Minister of Germany. It reads “The masks always send out a signal.”
Let me back up a bit, and tell you the whole story.
What happened is, I tweeted those two Tweets, and they came to the attention of the Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter (“Hessen 3C”), a department of another department of the Interior Ministry of the Federal State of Hesse. The Hessen CyberCompetenceCenter then reported my Tweets to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), which launched a criminal investigation of me.
One of the very best exposés of the covert, very well-hidden, bellicose attempts to rob all of humanity – barring the miniscule number of psychotic individuals comprising the inimical opposition – of their material possessions and their ‘immaterial’ freedom, was published fairly recently. It is accurately titled The Great Taking (2023), and was written by David Webb, one of the most courageous and finance-savvy authors I have ever come across. He introduces the book on p. 1 in uncompromising terms:
What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.
We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity.
In the Prologue of the book Webb paints a richly textured, autobiographical picture of his provenance as finance guru, obviously with exceptional intelligence and, it turned out, courage…
The Importance of Truth Speech. The parallel Rise of Propaganda-dependent Elites and Lonely Masses, and need for a new type of politician.
In my opinion, one of the more important speeches provided at the recent Fourth International COVID/Crisis Summit, held last November 2023 in Bucharest Romania, was delivered by my friend and colleague Dr. Mattias Desmet. Many but perhaps not all readers of this substack will be familiar with his groundbreaking synthesis published under the title “Psychology of Totalitarianism”. Others may recall my discussing Mattias’ theories and insights on various podcasts and with Mr. Joe Rogan, and the subsequent censorship response by Google and others when the terms “Mass Formation” and “Mass Formation Psychosis” were suddenly and explosively trending.
Dr. Desmet, Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone and I have spent many hours together since then, in our home, in his home, in Spain shooting the “Headwinds” films which were broadcast by the Epoch Times, visiting mutual friends, and in conferences such as ICS IV. I worked hard to make it possible for him to attend that meeting while maintaining his teaching schedule. He writes to me that there has been a concerted effort to convince him that I am “controlled opposition”, and to convince that he should disassociate from me. But, unfortunately for the propagandists and chaos agents, that is unlikely to happen as we have spent these many hours building a collaborative friendship and have been through thick and thin together. I steadfastly supported him through the academic attacks he has had, helped him build his substack following, and defended him when the Breggins maliciously attacked and defamed him.
These many concerted censorship and defamation attacks have taken a toll on him, as they have on me, but we both remain standing and continue our efforts to discern truth through the fog of the psychological war, the fifth generation warfare, which swirls around us.
The structures built to counter online activity of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS were turned inward against the domestic population.
Documents recently provided by a whistleblower reveal offensive tactics used by government and outside organizations to counter and preempt the spreading of undesirable information, said independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
Mr. Taibbi and journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag recently exposed a new set of documents from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), an “anti-disinformation” group that waged an aggressive information operation on the public.
The new documents, dubbed the “CTI files,” analyzed tactics used against foreign terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, that can now be applied domestically to prevent unwanted information from being published, Mr. Taibbi said in an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
The CTI files referred to these tactics with the military term “left of boom action” and justified their usage by the danger posed by somebody like former President Donald Trump, the journalist said.
Mr. Taibbi previously investigated and disclosed some of the “Twitter Files” after tech billionaire Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 and allowed Mr. Taibbi and other designated journalists to query the company’s internal files.
The Twitter Files show how Twitter, a major social media platform for political speech, had been intertwined with the censorship industrial complex to suppress or remove under government pressure content on various subjects, including irregularities in the 2020 elections, mail-in voting issues, and various aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The government censorship apparatus partnering with academia, nongovernmental organizations, and private research institutions is often called the “censorship industrial complex.”Preemptive Tactics
CTIL was supposed to be a volunteer organization with a goal to identify misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Taibbi said, but “in reality, you got under the hood—they were interested in basically any topic.”
One of the areas of interest for me as I weaved my way through my ten years of formal post-secondary education (yes, I spent the entire decade of the 1980s pursuing four degrees at several different universities; some of it part-time as I waffled between education and full-time work for relatively good pay in a grocery store) was that of epistemology (the nature and origins of ‘knowledge’). It was likely the result of some of my required readings: Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Clifford Gertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures. Regardless, I ended up exploring (outside of my regular classes) such topics as deconstructive criticism, hermeneutics, and philology; interesting topics for someone who ended up teaching elementary school students (10 years) and as a school administrator (15 years).
Upon reflection, this exploration of how humans come to ‘know’ what they know (or at least what they believe) has led me to be rather skeptical of dominant narratives, especially of ‘authority figures’. My challenging of ‘authority’, as it were, may have come somewhat ‘naturally’ given I grew up in the household of a police officer. Not that I consider my dad to have been ‘authoritarian’, not at all, but the somewhat ‘natural’ pushback children can give to parents was slightly coloured in our household by the simple fact that my dad was a sociocultural authority figure on top of his role as a father.
Anyways, I believe I have always questioned to a certain extent the ‘popular’ stories we are exposed to. And as I’ve read more widely over the years, I’ve come to hold that these stories tend to always play to the pursuits of the people that dominate society’s economic and power structures. Reading Edward Bernays’ Propaganda, Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State, and Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance has certainly solidified that feeling. In fact, I’ve come to believe that the primary motivation of our ruling elite is the control/expansion of the wealth-generating/extraction systems that provide their revenue streams. Everything they do serves this purpose in one way or another. Everything.
As Chomsky makes clear in Hegemony or Survival, one of the dominant concerns of the ruling elite is controlling the masses. Without such control, their power and privilege is at risk since the masses far, far outnumber the elite.
Rothbard argues in Anatomy of the State even just simple, passive resignation by the people that the status quo structures are inevitable is enough to sustain them. To ensure such acceptance, the State employs ‘opinion molders’ to justify/rationalise/persuade the population of the beneficence of the ruling elite and that some alternative is far worse.
In Propaganda, Bernays sets out arguing that democracies being so complex require an unseen group of people to guide their ideas and beliefs so as to ensure cooperation. It is this special cadre that directs what stories/narratives are to be believed that is the real ruling power in a society, not its politicians. And, of course, Bernays became an important part of the US Empire’s storytelling to market geopolitical ‘interventions’ as adventures in nation building and spreading democracy.
So, narrative control is essential to maintaining power and privilege. One of the growing ways of controlling the narrative in a world of social media and non-mainstream/corporate digital news is to ‘disprove’ alternative stories. One of the more recent forms of such control has been the phenomenon of ‘fact checking’. Fact checking has been marketed as a form of objective and investigative research into claims disseminated by others. If one can ‘check’ the ‘facts’ and show them to be biased, prejudiced, misinformed, misguided, purposely false, etc., then one’s own narrative can be shown to be ‘true’ and ‘factual’.
It would appear, however, that the ‘fact-checking’ narrative itself is beginning to fray quite openly, perhaps reinforcing the accusation by some that the process of ‘fact checking’ is far more about giving the appearance of objective support for dominant/mainstream storylines (virtually always in favour of the power and economic structures that favour the ruling elite) rather than actually providing ‘factual’ buttressing of well-documented and evidentiary arguments.
Although you will have some difficulty finding the following stories in most (all?) mainstream/corporate media outlets (this is one of the ways legacy media censures stories; they simply don’t report on them at all or very marginally— see the organisation Project Censored for ongoing examples), there is increasing exposure that ‘fact checking’ is nothing more than another tool in the toolbox of narrative control/propaganda used by the ruling elite.
In a lawsuit by journalist John Stossel, Facebook has defended its ‘fact checking’ by claiming that the third-party fact checkers it uses are merely the ‘opinion’ of the fact checkers it depends upon and thus protected under the U.S.’s First Amendment. It’s ‘opinion’ not actually ‘factual’ so the lawsuit is frivolous.
In another accusation of wrong-doing, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has written an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta calling the censorship and flagging of some of their work very problematic. In fact, the editors of the journal called Facebook’s fact checking: “inaccurate, incompetent, and irresponsible.” Facebook/Meta has yet to reply.
We have a long-time journalist standing up to the fact-checking process and Facebook defending itself by stating these ‘fact checks’ are really just the opinion of others. Followed by a well-respected medical journal challenging Facebook’s fact checking as completely off-base and unfounded. Two pretty strong strikes against a powerful media’s supposed objective ‘fact checking’ and increasing censorship of non-mainstream stories.
I could go one with example after example of such blatant manipulation of narratives by our ruling elite and their so-called ‘fact checkers’ but what else is there to say? Except, if the mainstream/corporate media and/or government/politicians are pushing repeatedly a narrative (or purposely censoring one), then it likely serves the purpose of manipulating what you believe so as to maintain/expand the status quo power and/or economic structures of our society. Their stories, no matter the rationalisation/justification for them, should always be viewed critically and questioned. Chances are they are serving their narrow purposes, not the wider society’s.
I see this all the time in many of the energy/resource stories I read and the domineering economic paradigm through which the ‘facts’ are viewed at the expense of an ecological lens. And while there has been a growing incorporation of environmental/ecological concerns in the energy/resource narratives, it seems to me it’s more about crafting storylines that serve to leverage concern about natural limits to further expand wealth and control, and certainly not to address the notion that we can’t continue to pursue growth in any form in perpetuity without doing irreparable damage to the natural systems we depend upon for our very survival.
No, we can chase growth, employ everyone, and forever raise our standards of living by constructing ‘Net Zero’ buildings and electric vehicles, all powered by ‘clean/green’ energy, and living happily ever after. Comforting stories to be sure, but also ones that feed the insatiable profit-seeking of the ruling elite at the expense of the natural systems that provide our ability to be alive.
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?
