Censorship

Threat To Our democracy

It was over a year ago that the FBI director publicly said our biggest threat is “domestic terrorism.” I don’t know if he was referring to white supremacists, or what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, or violence that broke out during Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I believe it is not domestic terrorism that is our biggest threat, but censorship. 

The Twitter Files have shown that various government agencies were influencing Twitter to silence journalists and the general public when they spoke out against the Russiagate probe and matters concerning the pandemic. They wanted Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, just weeks before the 2020 election. It’s ironic that the Russiagate probe was trying to show that Russia was interfering with the election in a way that helped former President Donald Trump, and the truth turns out it was our government who was trying to help Biden in the 2020 election. 

If you spoke out against the government’s policy on Covid, you could be targeted. That included saying things like; the virus originated in a lab, maybe even the Wuhan lab in China, or, you supported the idea that if you recovered from Covid and had natural immunity, you didn’t need the vaccine. Below is a quote from an article that Matt Taibbi wrote recently, an article that I started reading last night. Here’s a quote;

“In October 2018, DFRLab was instrumental in helping Facebook identify accounts for what became known as “the purge,” a first set of deletions of sites accused of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook in its announcement of these removals said it was taking steps against accounts created to “stir up political debate,” and the October 2018 “purge” indeed included the likes of Punk Rock Libertarians, Cop Block, and Right Wing News, among others. Even the progressive Reverb Press, founded by a relatively mainstream progressive named James Reader, found his site zapped after years of pouring thousands of dollars a month into Facebook marketing tools. “That’s what sticks in my craw. We tried to do everything they suggested,” Reader said then. “But now, everything I worked for all those years is dead.”

Who is the DFRLab? According to Taibbi, 

“we dug into the #TwitterFiles to revisit the integration of the Atlantic Council’s anti-disinformation arm, the Digital Forensic Research Labs (DFRLabs), while also highlighting its relationship with weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, Big Tech, and others who fund the NATO-aligned think tank.” 

“The Atlantic Council is unique among “non-governmental” organizations thanks to its lavish support from governments and the energy, finance, and weapons sectors. It’s been a key player in the development of the “anti-disinformation” sector from the beginning. It wasn’t an accident when its DFRLabs was chosen in 2018 to help Facebook “monitor for misinformation and foreign interference,” after the platform came under intense congressional scrutiny as a supposed unwitting participant in a Russian influence campaign.”

The Atlantic Council and its “disinformation” arm is a non-government agency supported by the government. There are several other such agencies that the Federal government relies on, so-called elites who know what disinformation is and who should be silenced. Another one is connected to Stanford University. Here’s another quote from Taibbi’s article;

“DFRLabs was also a core partner on the Virality Project, which pushed its seven Big Tech partners to censor “stories of true vaccine side-effects.” The Stanford Internet Observatory, which led the project, is now being sued by the New Civil Liberties Alliance for its censorship of “online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.” Debate as to the frequency of serious adverse events is ongoing, however. The German health minister put it at 1 in 10,000, while others claim it is higher.” 

The above paragraph illustrates how true information was sometimes suppressed. Some of these issues have more to do with “common sense” than topics that the elites, those from Stanford, Princeton, Yale, or Harvard, know and understand better than us common folks. In a free democracy differing opinions should be open to debate, one side shouldn’t be able to silence the other. In 2020 if you said the virus probably came from a lab, you were called a supporter of a conspiracy theory. Now some agencies in our government acknowledge that the virus may have come from a lab. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the motive behind the White House’s decision to require federal workers to be vaccinated, even if they have natural immunity, the motive was to benefit the vaccine makers. Follow the money. We should be able to discuss these ideas, have a debate, not be censored. Some people believe this is all about government control. I hope they are wrong, but as time goes by and I learn more, I’m beginning to think that might be the case. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but the situation that happened in Canada when the Prime Minister froze bank accounts belonging to the truckers who were demonstrating against Canada’s covid policies, is downright scary. I just recently read where the Prime Minister had people photograph the truckers license plates so they could be identified. That’s how they knew which accounts to freeze. They were even able to freeze bank accounts belonging to people who made go fund me like donations in support of the trucker’s protests.. 

If our government is able to gain more control of the internet, and they are able to spy on our every move, monitor our cell phone calls, watch our internet activity and what we post on social media, and if they don’t like any of that, they can shut us down, shut down dissent or debate. We are moving closer to the world described in George Orwell’s “1984.” What would the founding fathers think of a government that has that much control over its citizens? The 1rst Amendment is bedrock to a functioning democracy. Censorship is not, it’s cracking that bedrock. 

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