"Meet the Censored" will now come out in sets of left and right bans, in the (probably vain) hope that fewer people will cheer news of deletions and suspensions
(In a functioning democracy, the two sides could argue the question of whether the election was stolen by drawing evidence from mutually acceptable sources of fact. Today no such source exists. Most of the media has constellated into separate and mutually exclusive ecosystems, each the domain of a political faction, making it impossible to have a debate. All that’s left, as you may have experienced, is a shouting match. Without debate, one must resort to other means to achieve victory in politics: force rather than persuasion.
This is one reason why I think democracy is over. (Whether we ever had it, or how much of it, is another question.)
Suppose I wanted to persuade a far right Trump-supporting reader that claims of election fraud are baseless. I could cite reports and fact-checks on CNN or the New York Times or Wikipedia, but none of those are credible to that person, who assumes, with quite some justification, that these publications are biased against Trump. The same is true if you are a Biden supporter and I try to persuade you of massive election fraud. Evidence for that is only to be found in right-wing publications that you will dismiss out of hand as unreliable.
Let me save the indignant reader some time and write your scathing critique of the above for you. “Charles, you are establishing a false equivalency here that is shockingly ignorant of certain indisputable facts. Fact one! Fact two! Fact three! Here are the links. You are doing a disservice to the public by even broaching the possibility that the other side is worth listening to.”
When even one side believes that, we are no longer in a democracy. My point here isn’t to hold both sides equal. My point is that no conversation is happening, or can happen. We are past democracy now. Democracy depends on a certain level of civic trust, a willingness to decide the disposition of power through peaceful, fair elections informed by an objective press. It requires a willingness to engage in conversation or at least debate. It requires that a substantial majority hold something – democracy itself – to be more important than victory. Otherwise we are in a state either of civil war or, if one side is dominant, a state of authoritarianism and rebellion.
At this point it is clear which side has the upper hand. There is a kind of poetic justice in that the right wing – who perfected the information technology of hate-mongering and narrative warfare in the first place – is now its victim. Conservative pundits and platforms are rapidly being purged from social media, from app stores, even from the Internet entirely. In today’s environment, for me to even say this arouses suspicions that I myself am a conservative. I am quite the opposite. But like a minority of Left journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, I am appalled at the canceling, deplatforming, censoring, and demonizing of the right (including 75 million Trump voters) in what can only be called Total Information Warfare. In Total Information Warfare (as in military conflict) a key tactic is to make your opponents look as bad as possible. How can we have a democracy if we are being incited to hate each other by the very media we depend on to tell us what is real, what is “news,” and what the world is?
It looks today like the Left is beating the Right at its own game: the game of censorship, authoritarianism, and the suppression of dissent. But before you celebrate the expulsion of the Right from social media and public discourse, please understand the inevitable result: the Left will become the Right. This is already long underway, as the overwhelming presence of neocons, Wall Street insiders, and corporate champions in the Biden administration demonstrates. The partisan information warfare that began as a left-right conflict, with Fox on one side and CNN and MSNBC on the other, is rapidly reforming into a struggle between the Establishment and its challengers.
When Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Wall Street are on the same side as the military brass, the intelligence services, and the majority of government officials, it will not be long before those censored are those who disturb their agenda.
Glenn Greenwald makes the point well:
There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.)
Very well stated. What we have currently in the U.S. is a form of soft authoritarianism whereby anyone expressing a point of view outside the prevailing narrative of the ruling establishment risks being cancelled or deplatformed.
Establishment elites seemingly desire is to try to turn back the clock to the 1950s and 60s. This was a time when three major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), two wire services (AP and UPI) and a handful of newspapers (NYT, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, LA Times) and the Democrat and Republican Parties had almost complete control over the political narrative in the U.S. They are trying to make it the same now only the names have changed (e.g. Google, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, etc.)
It worked back then because the U.S was a much more homogenous country, there was no alternative media and ordinary citizens had very few opportunities to express their political points of view.
It is telling to watch Senators and Members of the House hold hearing after hearing complaining about the power of the tech companies, yet nothing is ever actually done about it. It's obviously nothing more than pure political theater done to make it appear as though our reperesentatives care how the evil tech companies are censoring/silencing/deplatforming ordinary citizens. The political establishment on both sides of the aisle have no interest in doing anything other than complain because they all benefit tremenedously from tech company censorship and authoritarianism.
I can say conclusively that this is the best comment I've seen on this issue, ever. I'll be using it repeatedly to try to talk some sense into both my left and right friends.
Hyperbole. The Biden upset and charges of election malfeasance is a mirror image of Bush/Gore and Trump/Clinton. The pillar of politics that is Hillary Clinton still disputes the 2016 results.
We are divided down the middle and every election will be very close, hotly contested and the results disputed by the loser. It’s politicking. It’s messy democracy. It’s not authoritarianism, none of us are being disappeared.
You guys act like this is unprecedented. It isn’t.
Jeb! was the Governor of the state that called it for W. All the media conspired to move on. You don’t think dem Americans felt like a descent into authoritarianism was occurring as the Patriot Act made us all spy fodder and the Congress conceded constitutional authority to declare war to the President under a poorly written authorization which is still being used 20 years later.
The eight years of Bush-Cheney & the four years of Trump-Pence certainly make extraordinary historical book-ends for the eight
years of Obama-Biden have proven to be a stark lesson, one fostered a Congressional violation of the Constitutionally mandated preservation of the balance of power between the three branches of our federal government, by creating legislative authorization for the creation of a Unitary Executive; the new granted unconstitutional powers of which George W. Bush, under the tutelage of his puppet master Dick Cheney, gleefully signed into law. As Galleta has noted, The Supreme Court, along with twelve years of Republican administration and eight years of Democrat administration have chosen to simply embrace and continue this Constitutional miscarriage for "20 years". For those who may be interested in a simple measure of the expense to the public well-being of this incredibly destructive behavior. not even mentioning the literally millions of deaths and life-changing damage perpetrated by the Executive Branch and it's Defense Department with no Congressional or Judicial oversight. The undeniable existing evidence of the magnitude of this single facet of the unconstitutionally acquired Unitary Executive enhancement is the twofold increase in the building and operation of literally several hundreds of new full-service military base installations around the world. The amazing research and writing of the late Chalmers Johnson-professor emeritus deals thoroughly with this incredible and wanton squandering of human lives and our national treasure in his book "The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic"; the first edition published in 2004.
Sorry for the digression from Matt's topic. If it made anyone angry, just remember those two important ingredients in life as described by the American novelist/humorist Tom Robbins
I had a happy childhood as a child, I highly recommend it, one has the whole rest of their lives for angst about major problems they can hardly affect.
I played stupid inside the group/ outside the group games in high school. I tired of them and moved on as soon as possible.
I know how behavior mod programs work and am appalled educators and govt leaders are encouraging fiscal irresponsibility with the idea that consequences will be shielded just to juice their abnormal growth addiction, are denying the need for accuracy, specificity and consistent process to achieving predictable, reliable results and approach social justice from a king of the hill mindset instead of a rising tide approach.
Thanks for replying to my garbled unresponsive mess of a non-reply. I hope you didn't feel that my feeble attempt to save it by concluding with the Tom Robbins reference, was meant in any fashion as a personal affront. I totally agree with your observation that "...one has the whole rest of their lives for angst about major problems they can hardly affect." By the way, the reference came from the ending of his book "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues", it's a great read. (:-}
This "angst" you reference is, I suspect, directly related to this topical issue of Matt Taibbi's concern, as well as his first post in his new series, which I was about to open when I noticed your reply in my inbox.
I was, and remain very interested in your earlier reference to the beginnings of the Bush v Gore debacle in Florida during the Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris malfeasance, and the ensuing 20 years of equally disturbing state and federal government misfeasance.
For now, I'm going to read Matt's new offering, and look forward to further understanding and comity in the solving of our problems that, as you so cogently expressed it, "...problems they can hardly affect."
Corporate media came into being at around the same time as the totalized (fascist) state. Media reverting to what it always was in the past - politically biased - is quite natural I think. Most newspapers in the past carried their political leaning in their names. How many newspapers around the country have the word "Democrat" in their title, as an example?
I don't know buddy. CNN used to be an entirely repetitive parade of the same stories recapped every half hour that only changed if a major story happened. Now it's a screen full of talking heads yammering at, over & through each. Gives me a fucking headache.
Geez, all social media is comprised of an army of obsessive phone addict wankers who retweet stories they agree with or belittle stories they don't. They're not journalists.
Or maybe they are and our fake definition of journalists as nonpartisan just has to change. In the past, reporting always had a partisan edge to it, even if we can't detect it today because our issues are not their issues.
What if we all ignored Twitter and let the powerless there spout off all they wanted? We manage to do the same with the gossip columns on Page 6 and at the Walmart/supermarket checkout. It has about the same relevance.
This is precisely what most of us are doing. 2/3 of the country lacks a college degree. Whoever finds overarching issues around their concerns, and organizes around those, can dominate. Neither of our major parties prioritizes truly helping them. The field is open, start organizing; primarily in person.
I think the Rs actually have an advantage. The left has set up such a labyrinth of speech codes that they'll ruin their careers if they manage to effectively talk to a group of working class people.
"The left has set up such a labyrinth of speech codes that they'll ruin their careers if they manage to effectively talk to a group of working class people."
Instead, declare the social media common carriers and insert a regulatory mechanism to make sure they stop making content choices. The whinging will stop after a while and people will get used to it. Let media do whatever it wants to do.
Other than giving lip service to this solution, why would the ruling class do this when the tech companies and big media can carry water for this tactic (per GG quote in Eisenstein's piece)?
Mainly because not doing so ends up losing mindshare ultimately. Absent (or even with) jackbooted thugs to threaten, people will find their samizdat. The state media becomes useless except as the butt of jokes. Wait, these people are stupid enough to do this.
Matt, next they will criticize you for “both-sidesism”. With each pair you publish, both sides will accuse you of equating their grand heroic martyr with an evil enemy of humanity. There is truly no pleasing the little tyrants all over the internet.
Anyway, appreciate your work brother, keep being true to yourself.
I think silencing political opposition as well as random individuals with differing opinions -- there's a difference --is far more prevalent on the left. Surveys confirm that a third of Americans are fearful of expressing their opinions; those least afraid of doing so are on the left. Others stay quiet for a reason: lost jobs, lost relationships, lost reputations. Was the curator in San Francisco who ventured to say that he would continue to buy pieces by white artists right wing? The Twitter-mobbed and humiliated Asian-American reporter forced to apologize because he dared quote a black man who said there would be no outcry if a black, instead of a white, had killed the same person? Is J.K. Rowling right wing for politely but firmly refusing to deny biological fact? There is nothing comparable to widespread CRT indoctrination. A trend conflates traditionally normal, liberal values, especially speech, with "conservative" or "right wing." I am no fan of either party. I did find it ironic that the most full-throated defense of American history, and the most effective sacking of the fraudulent Project 1619, came from the World Socialist Web. No one should be silenced.
WSW did a fine job dismantling the 1619 Project, but that's because they're Trotskyists who insist that human history is driven by class oppression rather than race oppression. They have a dog in the fight.
Of course it was partly self- interest, but not entirely; it didn't have to be nearly as full-throated to make the point. A deep respect for history, maybe country, maybe both, shone through those pieces. Who knew? That's speech. That's why it matters.
You're right, the effort does deserve respect. And one of the main spokespeople, Andre Damon, is surprisingly interesting, coming from such a radical group, with which I agree on almost nothing.
How 40% of young people could believe it is ok to restrict free speech and give its governing to a small body of CEOs is beyond my understanding. How could they not understand the history of this in reigns like Mao and Stalin. The free speech issue is probably one of the most important issue clouded by partisan politics but it is certainly not the only one. We just lived through 12 months of a pandemic which certainly was and I am very afraid we will live through decisions around our national energy strategy which will be also be deeply impacted by partisan politics and then in turn drive us further apart. God help our nation.
I can answer your question: It's because they don't know any of that history. I recently taught a class at a pretty good (top 25%) law school, where all my students but one didn't really know who Stalin or Mao were (Stalin was vaguely familiar as a WWII leader).
You can't have any decent understanding of the world today without knowing who they were and what they did. Mao's giant photo is still displayed on Tiananmen Square, for pete's sake.
I took ten minutes to fill them in. Five-year plans, collectivization, purges, gulag, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution: blank stares to all of it.
Somewhat to my surprise, at a liberal law school with a significant leftist element, no one seemed to dispute that communism was bad, no one reported me for making them feel unsafe after I discussed the pile of bodies that ideology has left behind, and they gave me kind course evaluations. So maybe all is not lost. I'm going into teaching very late in my career and didn't know what to expect.
They lacked having been taught this history and they lack living history too. The answer you gave to the "why" is correct: They don't know any better. Why don't they know any better? Depending on the topic, they haven't learned or seen any different. The same thing is true on criminal justice. "Kids today" have only lived in the super-safe era where they have no cares at all walking around Manhattan, but they do see the negatives of the system that buys them that.
Sometimes, sadly, we re-learn the lessons of history. It's both scary and reassuring. It just takes a few woke 20 somethings getting carjacked to wake them up to the problems with some of their deeply held ideas, and then the pendulum will swing back.
Good point. What most of the significant leftist element (of the past) - not the neoliberal order of the last 30 years or so in academe, used to believe is NOT that communism was the way forward but the cold war tactic of equating everything in opposition to capital as "communist" was wrong and inaccurate.
Socialism is not necessarily the road to communism. And there is something to be said about having a balance between equal forces (capital and labor) with both institutions playing important roles in society. The problem becomes when one is undermined, made to be subservient and allows the other to dominate society.
And when we look at the last two periods of dominance (1947-1970 - dominance of Keynesian economics, labor, full employment etc.. and the Neoliberal turn 1971 to present), we see who benefits and who does not.
In the first scenario, we had the golden era of economics in this country (mostly for white middle class families) where workers got paid a good wage, could afford housing, and save for retirement. In the other scenario, we have an entire class of billionaire and wannabees who have gutted the economy and our social fabric of society via finance to create monopolies, oligopolies and the largest spread of inequality between different classes in our history.
So painting the demon as socialism = communism was an overt strategy by the intelligence communities of the post WW2 America plus very conservative John Birch types.
It's good to see you on this thread "Skeptic". I first encountered your commenting when you mentioned that while attending, or maybe post-attendance of, law school you moved from liberal to conservative leanings. You mention herein that this "liberal law school" you taught a course at had "..a significant leftist element,". It does not appear, from the reaction to your class, by the students or faculty, that you were teaching in some extremist left-wing university environment that was, covertly or overtly, doing anything but providing a balanced educational environment without any fringe left or right wing emphasis.
I continue to believe that it is the fanatical-extremist-fringe elements of our society that exist, as the name infers, on the extreme fringes of every political persuasion. As we all are presently experiencing, they are the loudest, the most inconsiderate, the most reckless, and not surprisingly usually the most uninformed in our collective midst. Sadly, in modern parlance, they are presently garnering the most "clicks"; and therefore attracting the attention of the grifters in our society who are competing for ways to monetize these unhinged behaviors, the public good, health, peace, and safety be damned.
I would have absolutely loved to attend that class of yours; I taught Cultural Anthropology for 35 years, so welcome aboard good sir.
You should have mentioned the Khmer Rouge too. Go google 'bas reliefs khmer rouge' and view some of the images. Powerful and haunting stuff. Kids need to see it to believe it.
Because we did a good job of hammering home the evils of Nazi/Fascism but pretty much ignored the graveyard of Communism. Our intellectuals were horrified by the Nazis but were enthralled by Trotsky/Lenin, Mao & Castro et.al.
I really believe the intellectuals that drive our cultural & media institutions believe that bloodshed for the greater good is noble, so they’ll defend it no matter what.
Indeed. I use a test for my lefty friends around when I meet them to gauge where they exist on this spectrum. I bait the hook by asking them what they think about Noam Chomsky. If they indicate they're big fans, I dangle the baited hook in front of them and ask if they know that Chomsky and other, similar intellectuals at the time were active apologists for the Khmer Rouge genocide whilst it was happening and that to this day Chomsky refuses to apologize for his actions.
If they deny it I show them the receipts and out of the many times I've done this (probably over 30), only one person acknowledged it and disavowed Chomsky. Everyone else did the predictable thing that Chomsky did, which was say it was BS and pivot immediately to "it was all America's fault, anyway." We dismiss Maoist tactics at our peril.
Not to be too revolutionary, but what if we regained the ability to say that some people were very wrong about some things, while being very right about some other things? Almost any ideological "these things/people are 100% good, these others are 100% bad" pattern leads to trouble. There's a great demand now, everywhere, that every story be a simple story with a Hero and a Villain.
The ends of totalitarianism never justify the means. Both commies-$$$/class warfare and Nazis/fascists-race/nationalism would disagree with this-their end is all.
I'm with KDBD on their points and yours. That was really the point of my test. I'm sure you have lefty (and righty) friends like me who are enamored with their own unshakeable beliefs around their politics. The Chomsky test has always been a way for me to show that even people that one thinks are the heroes in the story have flaws. It's also a way of personalizing things, because the Khmer Rouge genocide is personal to me - I've been to Cambodia several times and have friends there and here that literally grew up in the shadow of the genocide. I've been to the Killing Fields. I've been to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I met Chum Mey and spoke with him directly about his experience.
To this day it still burns me that Chomsky essentially got away with his casual, imperious apologia about the Khmer Rouge. Almost no one talks about it anymore to the point that the talk of Chomsky on the left has become reverent and hagiographic. Is he a hero of the left? Certainly. But my last sentence stands - we dismiss Maoist tactics at our peril. The Khmer Rouge were an even more depressing endpoint than the Maoists, but the same ideas apply - rigid policing of language, rigid policing of class status, rigid policing of how one can exist in society. It's the flip side of the fascism coin, and the reality is that there is a straight line from the woke nonsense occurring right now to 1960's China and 1970's Cambodia.
While it hardly compares to the Khmer Rouge, the Shah's government or Marcos in the Phillippines were hardly exemplars of liberal governance to feather the cap of the Nixon or Reagan Administrations. Both of those guys are heroes today to certain folks. Nixon being an unexpected one, remembering how he was viewed in the 80s, let's say.
Agreed. I think both men had complicated legacies. I'm not a fan of Reagan, whose history has been rewritten as hagiography and a lot of his administration's mistakes have been conveniently papered over because of the mythology Republicans wish to foist on him. Nixon - now there's a fascinating President. Truly corrupt and an actual, verified criminal, he was also responsible for normalizing relations with China and instrumental in the creation of the DNR and EPA and ending the draft. But a hero, either of them? Agreed, certainly not.
Your comment on how Khmer-Rouge is personal to you is a very important one. I don’t think I had much of an idea of how bad Mao was until it became personal for me(I started having people work for me that were directly impacted by Mao and my husband had an office report to him out of China and close personal friends there. All of a sudden what happened in China became very real and we started really studying why we were seeing what we are seeing.
It's an excellent point that I wish more people understood. It's amazing how folks' opinion on LGBT can change when one finds out one's son is gay, or on abortion when one's 16 year old daughter finds out she's pregnant. It's also a big reason why I am a huge proponent of world travel and meeting people who are from or live in other countries.
My fellow Americans who don't connect with those folks or don't travel internationally (a truly staggering percentage, unfortunately) love to complain endlessly about how horrible living in the US is, and I would love for them to learn and understand the myriad experiences of those who don't live here or are not from here, because they will tell you almost to a person that we Americans won the cosmic lottery by being born here. Additionally, there has never, ever been a better time to be alive.
I give Nick Krystof from the NYT a lot of credit on this front. Even though he is an uber progressive, he also says yearly that this current year is always the best year in history for the average world citizen, even at the same time he is decrying the poverty in this and other countries.
All to say, the people who escaped Mao and the Khmer-Rouge understand in a way that we cannot of how good we have it.
I like my hero vs villain story as much as the next person. But that is very rare and even when it happens the villain or hero can still have faults. We are human. It is clear to me that neither side of the political spectrum is either all hero or all villain and the only way for our country to not fall is for us to engage productively but in this age of all right or all wrong I sometimes lose hope this will happen. I actually in the end don’t blame the youth. I blame their teachers and our leaders who are self serving and egotistical
Boy I agree with that My paternal side was republicans and my maternal were democrats. They had heated discussions but loved each other and could admit when the other side was wrong. My Father sometimes crossed over to Democratic and my Mother a bit more rarely to Republican but that does not exist now.
I think we can likely track it back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who’s philosophy was directly linked to the bloody French Revolution. This crap is still playing out to this day.
And that’s why George Orwell is an international political/intellectual icon these days and Hemingway is basically a character from a Jimmy Buffet song.
I use to think George Orwell was over the top in imagining what could ever happen in the US. Now I am not as sure. I put our my faith in the judiciary system and a few leaders across the spectrum willing to take a stand.
Oh come on... Germany's new age before WWII was championed by the youth and seen as being worlds ahead of the old establishment... The Kaiser never flew to ten rallies in a day like Rudolf Hilter did, and didn't understand how to use modern media to get a "message" out there.
Fast forward to China in the 70s, and again it was the youth that were whipped up enough to go dragging landlords out on the streets for the New People's Rebellion.
It's always the same, and always ends with having to shoot your way out of it.
I have never felt particularly strongly one way or the other about the second amendment for the first 40 years of my life. The last decade I have seen it’s importance. I am still not a fanatic about it but definitely see it’s potential to be a deterrent
Exactly-a deterrent. Do I, personally, know anyone who has a good reason to own 27 AR-15s-no, but I support their right to do so. I do, however, know or have met plenty of service professionals-HVAC, tow truck, real estate,etc-who carry weapons and have had cause to use them as a potential deterrent-not shooting anyone, but letting the individuals in the situation know they were carrying.
I don't concealed carry though there is constitutional carry in my state. I rely on my much more gun-freaky neighbors to take care of that. At least a quarter do.
The point is, when i'm in a convenience store or a restaurant, if someone tries to hold the place up, they can and do expect a hail of gunfire. Mission accomplished, I say.
They can believe that as the level of education in the US is abysmal. And that goes from kindergarten to Ph.D. programs. The sheer amount of bigotry in those institutions is horrifying.
I think that is true but I also say I don’t think I learned most of what I know about Mao, Stalin in school. I think I picked it up via news and movies and hearing my parents talk about it. My mother in particular introduced awareness of Stalin and the fear we had about nuclear holocaust potential tended to push me to learn more. So I think it is the schools but it is more then that
Schools rarely touch upon Stalin or Mao. Mao's only mentioned as the guy who took charge of China when it went red and the guy in charge of China when Nixon went over there to restore relations. And Stalin is treated as a dullard dictator (who's evil has ALWAYS been whitewashed to just vagaries) who Hitler bullshitted then backstabbed, forcing us to ally with him and eventually took over eastern europe in the aftermath of WW2.
This is quite truth-students get some “Stalin bad” for 5 minutes, but nothing like the 2 weeks of History Channel-Schindler’s List Nazi porn. Mao-who’s that!?!?!
Nazi porn isn't even descriptive enough. The sources you cite do to the historical record what wokesters do to today's news. Everything the Nazis did, mostly was done ...better is the wrong word for hateful things, "more vigorously" is closer to the truth - by others. There is very little that was exceptional about the Nazi state except inasmuch as they were used as a diversion from other nations antisemitism, embrace of eugenics, ethnic cleansing, etc.
Hollywood prefers pics about Hitler over Mao/China. Because when you try to sell that stuff in China...well, you can't. That's a lot of lost ticket revenue. Germans are happy to lap up more criticism of Hitler and movies about bad Russians sell well everywhere. Follow the money. Kind of like the NBA's stance on China. Not good for business. So you get lots of exposes about Fascist Germany, Russian super villains. But China?
The estimates of deaths under Mao are between 50-80 million. Some put as high as 100 million. Under Stalin the estimates are between 25-30 million. But deaths are only part of what they did to decimate their country. Some offer up the excuse for Mao that the majority of the people died because of bad policy but that is not really the whole truth. When he took power over the next 5 years 4-6 million people were outright killed or died because they were sent to labor camps. Much the way Hitler did. But the terror he created during this time kept people from ever contradicting what future policy which then resulted in another 45-70 million deaths. He is often listed as the number 1 or 2 deadly leader of all time. A key plank in both Stalin and Mao was the absence of free speech. Something happened between 1900 and 1940 that created 3 of the most deadly leaders of all time, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. We teach our children about the horrors of the Nazi reign and that is correct but we do little to also teach about Stalin and Mao to our own detriment. I had people work for me that was sent to one of the labor camps and we have a good friend whose father was in one. They were just as devastating as Hitlers concentration camps and Stalin’s Siberia camps.
I picked up my copy of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson, just because it is here, and started reading sections of it. It’s very fascinating so far. There’s an interesting paragraph that I want to come back and share with you tomorrow.
If you consider things like the famines in China and the Holodomor in Ukraine, the numbers cited are rather low. Khrushchev's 27 million death toll cite for WWII in Russia also must be factored in. Not every death was caused by German action, many were caused by the Soviet authorities taking actions they thought appropriate, analogous to the internment of the Japanese in the US, but more deadly. If you just cite 100 million killed by Communism, one is underestimating but in a safe way.
It's hilarious how many commenters are just ignoring the crux of this post (or, you know, just the title of the post) and retreating into "actually, the left does it more." It's not a victimhood competition.
The competition for victim status is intense - thus intersectionality has to disentagle who is the most victimized from those of lesser. I think we should really refer to it as the great teeter-totter of oppression.
Points for including "intersectionality"! I have been working on a phrase or comment that includes "intersectionality", "disproportionally, and "historically" in one sentence - that, I think, would pretty much sum up conversation in the 21st Century - so far, anyway ...
It's both "hilarious" and very sad, especially in terms of the selective method of reading employed to evidently prop up some uninformed narrative rather than comprehensively allowing themselves to be informed by what is actually/factually being said. I thought Matt, as usual, did an excellent job of explaining the focus of his new upcoming series; and summed up his REASONING for doing it beautifully in his closing paragraph.
"Ten years from now, people will likely not have trouble realizing that putting five or six companies in charge of regulating all content was probably not a good idea, for all but a small handful of empowered actors. At the moment, the partisan angle is clouding the issue, as ordinary people are being conned into viewing speech as a giant turf war in which they have a rooting interest. News flash: you probably don’t."
How can this level of intellectual clarity and honesty be so blindly misconstrued and deconstructed????{:-(
It's good to see, and comprehensively read, you again.
Obliged EA---One of the reasons I actually comment here (and rarely elsewhere) is people are generally thoughtful and I've had my mind changed once or twice and had some bogus info I thought was right patiently deconstructed.
Firmly believe the Brandeis line about that the answer to "bad" speech is "more speech, not enforced silence." No idea why anyone would root for other people being silenced just because they've been convinced someone else's politics are "dangerous." Have noticed the trend with a few of my more "I identify as a Democrat!" type friends and it sucks. They're still receptive to the counterargument but who knows for how long?
Self-righteousness - the idea that you are right and because you are right you are good/pure and because you are good/pure you are safe (which is what the ego wants more than anything else) - this is one the most seductive (and unfortunately reductive) mental modalities in the world. It is the modality that has driven all religious wars and oppressions and all of the politically driven slaughters. Rightness. What is going on right now is pretty similar (excepting we haven't seen a huge amount of state sponsored killings just yet).
I can't believe I am saying this having fled from fundamentalist Christianity in my young adulthood, but I am actually finding Christianity and Christians to be more tolerant than the regressive left - because they have the concept of redemption and forgiveness present in their doctrine. This and the fact that they don't single out a particular group for having sinned and fallen short. It's everyone.
Of course there are more extreme sects and beliefs - evangelicals will always be with us ;-). But your garden variety Christian, in our modern era, is typically pretty tolerant.
I wonder how many on the left *are* actually these "no mistakes ever" types, the snitchy assholes that no one can stand and who orient everything through their narrow view of the world. My hope is that they're what you alluded to---equivalently evangelical Christians, but for their politics. The loudest, shittiest people tend to get all the pub and I genuinely haven't come across this sort of person in the real world. Because, as you said, while religion is obviously a magnet for whackjobs and zealots, I find the vast majority of Christians to be decent, regular people. Most of my friends are pretty far left and don't behave in the gross ways you're reacting against. Hoping that's the case for most people. Hard to tell, especially having been pretty isolated for the year this kind of thing has really started to metastasize.
Wish I could be a fly on the wall some days. These are truly interesting questions. And it's probably true that many who lean left aren't radicals. But both social media and the MSM showcase the loudest, angriest voices—because it makes them rich, richer, richest. Note Matt's recent article regarding how media profits are down and how they are seeking a new "Trump" that they can sell. It's an ugly business.
Beyond that, I think the web and social media in particular is giant amplifier for our psyches. People can express without filters (id) more easily due to both anonymity and lack of physical proximity to their audience. It used to take quite a bit of effort to be seen and heard on a broader scale. Now, you just turn on your computer and you can express to potential millions with a few clicks. Think of what that does to the human ego.
Remember the movie "Mean Girls?" The whole point was that popularity gives people license to be a**hats. IOW, it goes to their heads. And they very often leverage this power to engage in self-aggrandizement, peer pressure tactics and bullying. I think this tendency combined with an earnest desire to shortcut to a perfect world makes people (impatient, young people in particular) more susceptible to these shallow ideologies that promise utopia if everyone will just get on board.
So the effort to sell the ideas ramps up. And selling often involves pressure - coercion, gaslighting, bullying, misrepresentation, inciting fear, seed of doubt tactics, etc. Add to this a desire on the part of oppressed groups for some revenge (or at least schadenfreude) against the culture that caused them harm. Add to this the constant barrage of advertising messaging the feeds our narcissistic egos and promises us that if we spend enough money we will have perfect lives where we don't have to work hard to get everything we want. Add to this a huge population of highly educated but unemployed young people with lots of leisure time.
Honestly, modern culture is kind of a mess. All of the old mores, values, and belief structures that used to provide some kind of framework or grounding are fragmenting and losing moral authority - justifiably so in many cases because they engaged in discriminatory behavior. It's sort of a perfect storm. Impatient young people in pursuit of utopia are throwing the baby out with the bath water. What's mystifying is that the adults in the room are abetting this behavior. That's what I don't get. That's why it is so powerful and spreading so fast. Is it white guilt? Maybe.
I think there is a deep well of white guilt in this country. My own experiences growing up in white culture in this country have illuminated the fact that white culture exhibits a tendency to avoid dealing with things head on. It sweeps things under the rug. It places a huge priority on "propriety"—what is allowed and not allowed to be addressed or expressed publicly, even privately. I was abused as a child and no one in my family will discuss it—which isolates me and makes me pariah when I do try to discuss it. And if you don't bring things into the light, they can't be healed. So, it stagnates in our subconscious and never gets addressed or healed or dealt with. And it becomes guilt. Because we know what is right and wrong. We just know. And all of our fancy rationalizations and outright lies (denials) don't change this truth.
I don't believe that every white person is racist or personally culpable for racism. However, there was a concerted effort by certain segments of white culture in the 20th century to destroy communities that were creating black wealth and to prevent black families from building generational wealth through various institutional obstacles placed in their way. They were denied the ability to join the quest for the American Dream. Imagine if you had watched your family struggle across generations - working hard, keeping their noses clean, following all of the rules - only to be pushed down and denied advancement (that they had rightly earned) or to be proscribed to certain menial roles/jobs (like black women as poorly paid nannies/maids in the old south) on top of Jim Crow proscriptions. Resentment and despair would build. And you would be tired and demoralized. And then Uncle Sam comes along and says I can solve all of your problems and gives you housing and a monthly stipend for living plus extra for kids - particularly kids with no father around? You wouldn't see that as a trap. You would see it as an opportunity to get a break for a change—not realizing the long-term impact on your family and culture.
This is our sin. I want very much to be able to support efforts to lift up and heal black culture in this country. I just can't support CRT and the way it's being done now. You can't shame and dehumanize people and expect a better world to result. It just won't work. And I am very interested in what WILL work. I am a pragmatist. But a romantic, too. “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” —MLK
I just refuse to become an ugly or mean person to achieve this. It must come from the better angels of our nature or it won't stick. Hate never won nuthin'.
Imagine learning one day that your spouse is okay with censorship when someone says that it is misinformation. In this case, you are the conservative and your spouse is a Democrat. Then, you go off for an hour or two on how liberal values around our civil liberties is what unites Americans. But at the end of the conversation, your still not sure if you made any difference. It is fucking depressing.
My wife doesn't get it either, but she's not a Democrat. I'm trying desperately to avoid a generalized conclusion here. People in general do not think out these things very well. I'd be anti-democratic except for that Churchill bit about worst forms of government.
It is possible that my wife has always held these views but it has never come up before. It is also possible that she has been influenced by talking heads in the recent past.
I enjoy speaking with her about political issues because she is very adept at challenging me and providing me with an alternative point of view. But she doesn't appreciate that dialog as much as I do.
In the not too distant past, some outspoken members of the religious right were proponents of censoring content that they viewed as salacious and immoral. I considered them to be an outlier but I could be wrong.
I assumed that we, as a society, were well past the point where censorship would be considered to be a valid response to dissenting views by a mainstream audience. It feels like I have woken up to an alternate reality but it is possible that it has always been like this and I am the one who is the outlier.
The problem with democracy, in the abstract, is that democratic institutions are often never established or respected, before democratic elections take place.
Look at the difference between Singapore and Egypt. Both are former British possessions that gained independence post WWII. Singapore was basically a dictatorship under Lee Kwan Yew-but they also had very strict property rights laws and a judiciary that was considered effective and independent. Democratic institutions were strongly established despite a lack of electoral democracy-and have continued to this day.
Egypt, otoh, had none of these things, and when the Arab Spring happened in the wake of the Mubarak regime, the Egyptians promptly elected the Muslim Brotherhood into power, who, in the lack of any meaningful checks in the form of the courts or respected legal barriers, promptly started doing what fundamentalist whack jobs do and necessitated a military coup to stop violence against Christians and generally unpleasant jihadi type actions. Singapore had strong democratic institutions despite a lack of electoral democracy, whereas Egypt didn’t and completely spit the bit as a society and n the wake of their very first democratic elections.
As I just posted elsewhere, some of this has to do with what you read/watch - people see it happen to their side because that is what they are tuned into.
No doubt about that, bud. But the entire post is about how this isn't really an issue of left/right. It's an issue of corporate power. The idea that Facebook or Google are "leftist" organizations is hilarious.
Except that Democrat Inc. includes a bunch of corporations, all of Hollywood/Entertainment, a good deal of media minus the Rupert Murdoch owned Fauxtainment television & all of academia. You can call it any name you want, the “left”, neo-liberal, liberal establishment but it’s all a wing of the DNC. Any kind of power the Republicans ever had is a fading one, i.e. fossil fuels, construction, military ect... Evej the Nat Sec. is currently coming up to the woke sect of the dems with their Critical Social Justice movement in the military.
So, sorry, anyone “standing up” to the meany Republicans thinking they’re speaking “Truth to Power” is delusional!
I saw this on Twitter so I’ll paste it here because it fits this whole corporate woke era we’re living in:
“ Never in human history a “resistance/revolution” of anything was backed by mainstream media outlets, government, academia, & the art world at the same time.
If your ideas are backed by the media, the gov, academia, & the art world it’s safe to say that you are the status quo.”
You seem to be assuming I think the the parties are indicative of what "left" or "liberal" or "right" or "conservative" mean. They aren't. They're actually far more similar than they are different, both wholly committed to trade policies that have hollowed out the working class, wars of choice, fealty to their donor classes, and on and on.
You want to argue that the big tech is more pro-DNC than pro-GOP? Sure, we can do that. I'd probably agree though there are some interesting counterarguments. But again: the idea that these parties are standins for any coherent ideology isn't one I'm gonna go along with, nor is the idea that the GOP is somehow a "fading" power in this country. They aren't. They're part of the establishment uniparty with the same goals. Chances are, those goals aren't yours or mine.
I always find the notion that Hollywood is so “leftist” funny. Take sex out of it and it doesn’t look so “left.”
I realize the point about corporate power, my point was to your point about people whining about who does it more - if you don’t follow leftist publications you won’t know about the effect on them and vice versa.
<<Take sex out of it and it doesn’t look so “left.”>>
I am wracking my brains trying to think of an actually sexy Hollywood movie that has come out in the last 40 years. RISKY BUSINESS maybe, but it's all about how sex (and everything else) is subsumed by neoliberal capitalism, rendering it anti-sexy. Limp.
I nominate "Almost Famous". If you don't like that, then how about "Boogie Nights". Both of them have the feature of being historical films about the 1970s (and 80s in Boogie Nights' case).
People who think Hollywood is "left" should read the stories about how the military consults on basically every movie they're tangentially involved in before they can keep making that argument.
And yeah---we're in agreement on these for sure. Example: I knew about the WSWS deprecations but not about a few of the other folks Matt has highlighted. Been instructive learning more.
This is true of the entire US paramilitary branch, to include the police too. Hollywood has always been in bed with the State because to them it's simply business.
Half the posts I see here (and skip) are victimization posts revolving around whataboutsisms versions if "who is the REAL (Fill in grievance here).
It's tiring and sad. It also creates a great opening to take down central principles in a partisan fashion. It's the very thing that resulted in Mr. Taibbi's "Miserable" need to post censorship in pairs.
It's all seems pretty "but Mom, he touched me first,!!!" but if it gets a few extra people to focus more on our shared loss of liberty than their grievance dopamine bump from playing the victim I guess it's worth it.
Censorship is only one face of a two-sided coin, the other side being the increasing deliberate manipulation and distortion of new stories by the mainstream press, as we saw recently when it surfaced 60 Minutes/CBS deliberately distorted a story about DeSantis in Florida and using a local supermarket chain for COVID vaccines. There was no reason for 60 Minutes to fictionalize the DeSantis interview except to deliberately be a hit piece against a potential Republican threat.
I found it chilling but sadly I wasn't surprised. After all, we live in a time when the once impeccable NYT now openly admits it passes off opinion as facts in its articles and deems it acceptable because somehow it's... for the greater good? Are we heading for a time where otherwise intelligent media figures not only censor but deliberately make up news specifically to attack threats to what they deem as the good society? It's the same mindset that allowed the repressive totalitarian regimes to function. But it's also a distinctly non-liberal mindset. Does it imply that the American establishment no longer truly believes in liberal democracy? If so, then Houston, we have a problem.
I'm not sure how this is all going to play out. Americans aren't ignorant. Too many people know what is going on.
"the increasing deliberate manipulation and distortion of new stories by the mainstream press"
Yes, that's gotten completely out of hand. It's blatant and unceasing. I'd argue it's the worse side of the two-sided coin. But, like you said, it's the same coin.
Once upon a time, that practice was fought by editorial departments. Separation of church and state, it was called. It made the job of advertising departments harder, and it wasn't a perfect system, but it at least recognized that editorial reputation was important.
Thus far, the tactics lack the sweep and draconian authoritarianism of authentic Fascism. An actual Fascist government wouldn't just shut down a website; they'd punish the hosts and their backers, and maybe even their audience, using surveillance and detention tactics associated with martial law.
But the alliance of top-down authority in the public and private sectors to pursue the goal of censorship is uncomfortably reminiscent.
The rest of the world looks at us as “the new banana republic”. Our old President is silenced and our new government is an armed camp with twelve foot barriers, razor wire, and armed guards.
It doesn't really feel like an apples to apples comparison. Right leaning sources are much more likely to be targeted, while leftist leaning sources suffer more from collateral damage. In an age where support for individual rights is viewed as a right wing belief, it will be harder to see the occasional de-platforming of a self proclaimed left leaning person as an actual attack on the left. Traditional liberals simply are no longer left of center.
That might depend on where you are getting your stuff from - if you don’t follow “leftist” stuff you won’t notice when it is throttled. And it doesn’t matter which side you are on, question the military, war, imperialism or Israel (and they don’t have to all be connected) and you’ve got some problems coming.
This slanderous t---l joined this site on June 21st 2020, so his particular sulfuric stink may be around for the next 2 1/2 months or so. Even more disappointing, there are actually others herein that up-click his denigrations and petty name-calling. OH NO! Did I just call him a petty name? Oops, I almost called him a troll.
Matt, if you are gauging by feedback from Twitter, I want to point out something.
Non-woke, non-left-leaning people join Twitter. They make polite-enough posts, get replies/likes/retweets, have fun, yay yay, etc. Then one day, with no announcement or explanation whatsoever, they'll find they are not getting feedback. They probably never even know why: they've been shadowbanned. Lack of feedback -- i.e., fun -- causes them to stop using or cut back on Twitter.
The end result is a Darwinian survival of the fittest, with Twitter having decided that woke is what's fit.
Twitter is a redux of junior high school cafeteria. The greater question should be, why does anyone give the tiniest little shit about that? If Twitter is truly a source of "news" to anyone, that person is pretty much beyond all redemption as a citizen. That Trump was once the colossus of Twitterdom ought to tell everyone all they need to know.
All anyone needs to do is READ comments in Twatter and they'll see it's full of illegible, incoherent and poorly educated dumbasses yapping a lot about NOTHING.
Utterly useless to anyone NOT trying to plug some product.
It seems strange to me that anyone really has anything left to say on the subject. I would suggest (and have with each new article you offer) that censorship is, in any way, by anyone, for any reason, wrong. Period.
It is an unassailable tenet in a free and open society, that stifling speech will result in the demise of that society. Critical thought will wilt. Truth will never see the light of day. And we will all be the less for it.
And spare me the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" knee-jerk. It doesn't now, nor will it ever hold water outside the mind of the feeble who believe it to be a legitimate exception.
I have something left to ask on the subject. How much tech censorship is driven by commercial (and thus in my view, legitimate) interests versus the personal interests of random censors or top down execucrats? I actually don't have a clear understanding of that. How much censorship is Youtube deciding that hosting oddball conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting might actually be worse for selling advertisements than hosting porn? A huge part of me wants to believe it is a significant part, but the evidence keeps piling up that it isn't true. You simply can't spin the decision to block Trump from Twitter or censor the Hunter Biden story as a commercial decision. It's fundamentally anti-commercial. The ham-handed censorship of different takes on the seriousness of covid seemed like neither a commercial nor partisan decision but like evidence of an inability of censors to distinguish informed and uninformed opinion - thus demonstrating exactly why they shouldn't do it. My twitter account was suspended for re-tweeting an Aaron Mate tweet - that wasn't deleted by Twitter - pointing out that Reality Winner, regardless your opinion of how she was treated, was a trumpet-blower, not a whistleblower. I mean, I literally have no twitter followers and use the site almost exclusively as a reader. If I can attract the censors on that site, this national conversation is way, way more managed than the public realizes.
It's a great question. Are we dealing with 1. Orwell's "1984," 2. Bradbary's "Fahrenheit 451" Or 3. William Harrison "Rollerball" (1975 version with James Cann highly underrated movie).
It's obviously all three, but I think it's often a case of a shared interest for different reasons while they pretend to support the same cause. I will give you one example of many.
For the past 20 years we have been going through a moral panic around sex work relabeled as sex trafficking (See the deeply racist "White Slavery" panic from the early 1900's that is a carbon copy of what we are experiencing now).
This all started in the late 1990's after the VAWA was passed and the left and right came together to criminalize all sex work. Over the next 20 years they formed countless NGO's Like Demand Abolition, Shared Hope and The Polaris project, sometimes run by crony philanthropists like Cindy McCain and Swanney Hunt who found it an easy way to get a free government buck and poitical influence by stirring the pot and feeding largely suburban insecurities that every white van in America and interracial couple with a kid was really another young girl being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery.
Fast forward to the early 2010's and local police, politicians and prosecutors, realizing the glory days of the drug war were coming to an end with Eric Holder removing most of the Federal funding to local police to incentivize them to treat every loose joint like a major drug trafficker, the sex traffic moral panic thing seemed like a great replacement as federal funding through things like the VAWA grant shifted in that direction. The last 30 years had made them pro's at stirring up middle class anxieties with stories of "super-predators" so they barely needed to change their tactics, posters or messaging. They simply turned drug trafficking into sex trafficking.
Opportunistic AGs from around the country (AGs are always a great stepping stone to higher office) found this to be an excellent political opportunity with everyone from Elliot Spitzer in New York (that one didn't turn out very well) to AG Josh Hawley to AG Kamala Harris to Gavin Newsome and hundreds more local politicians from around the country pinning their political star on taking down some small time massage parlor in the area, than pretending with the media that they just took down a major international trafficking ring. It was all too easy and the media was anxious to play along for the click bait that both appealed to fear and sex, too all time winners. That they were mostly destroying the lives of middle aged foreign Asian women trying to pay their bills didn't much bother than and ICE was always handy to take the women away before they could be asked if what they were doing was really involuntary, which is the actual definition of sex trafficking.
The media, already floundering with big tech eating their advertising revenue lunch learned quickly that sex trafficking stories made great click bait and low quality journos like Nick Kristoff over at the NYT got clicks for endless, brealthless stories about young girls (mostly Asian) lured into a life of sexual depravity were more than once he was duped by a rent seeking NGO claiming to be a sex traffic victim to make a quick buck:
Like most journos in that space, ethical violations and major blunders caused little dount about his white savior narrative. Last I checked he was working with religious fundamentalists groups like Exodos Cry to take down Pornhub as a "major trafficking organization." By that he means getting payment processors to steal money from from middle ages Mom's doing porn to feed their kids and pay their rent. Going after payment processors. Sound familiar? This was pioneered by Sheriff Dart up in Cook County who in 2014 collaborated with NGO's do deny payments services to sex workers to use ad site Backpage.
All the tools now being used to censor "Fake News" on the internet were perfected against sex workers over the past 10 years and no one cared about the 1st amendment because it was all redefined as sex trafficking.
Back to our story, big media realized the public will accept censorship if it's sold to them along with the "save the children from sex trafficking!" panic. All over the country, local cops took down local sex work boards and started throwing people in jail for running these small community boards whether they did it for free or not. It's a clear violation of the first amendment, but no one cares because it's "only sex workers" and we are stopping sex traffickers!
Big media soon sees this moral panic as way to go after section 230 and re-establish big media as a walled garden by attacking Facebooks, Twitter and Google for "promoting sex trafficking online"
The Plot Against Section 230 Is Being Run By Big Legacy Companies Who Failed To Adapt To The Internet
Big tech takes a look at this push to repeal section 230 to "save the children" and realizes it will become impossible expensive for small start ups to compete if they law requires them to hire all the moderators and attorney's necessary to "fight sex trafficking" once section 230 is repealed. For them it becomes and easy way to close the door on the next Facebook or Twitter behind them by raising the cost to entry with new moderation requirements.
DCRM companies from Disney to Sony soon realize that repealing section 230 will allow them to regain control over profits the open internet has cost them but shutting down platforms where people can get content without paying them a royalty for it. The start pouring money into the presidential bid of Kamala Harris, who already made it this far by shutting down Backpage and pushing FOSTA/SESTA as a way to fight online sex trafficking because they know she is their girl. Do bad she has literally no personality.
And there you have it. An example of how all three models worked at shared purpose for different reasons to take down "fake news" originally branded as "stopping sex trafficking."
The FBI, who actually got it's start fighting "the white slave panic" of the last century now has not only their replacement for the drug war that is ending, but so much work that even Homeland Security and and Customs can get in on this extremely high asset forfeiture (since it's illegal most transactions are done in cash) work as well.
I realize that was very long, but I hope it shows how once you scare the pubic with a moral panic everyone profits
seems there was a sad and pathetic attempt at a remake a few years back.
Lazy-assed Hollywood. If they want to socially engineer us, they ought to at least stop remaking the classics and come up with some original material. God know's they're paid enough and praised enough (even if it's self-congratulatory) to do it right, not do it over.
It's hard to get a sense of proportion, but if you want an example of conspiracy, look no further than Alex Jones. He was unpersoned by every major social media site within DAYS of each sites. People say it was just follow the leader, but... come on. Organizations of that size don't make those kinds of decisions that fast. If it wasn't a coordinated attack to get rid of somebody they didn't like, I'll eat my hat.
Thankfully, it was ineffectual. Alex Jones has as much of an audience as he ever did. (Speaking as a former fan who has been catching his act for around the past 20 years, I now despise the man. His exploitation of Sandy Hook was the last straw.)
My big worry is that there will be a continued push to use methods that DO work to ban people successfully, or to effectively reduce access to their sites.
It's not commercially driven. It doesn't cost fb, twitter, google, et. al, a penny to allow a post to remain up or an account to remain active. In fact, it's just the opposite. The actually generate MORE revenue.
As for the screeching harpies who can't stand opposing points of view and seek to banish and cancel those points of view, one has to wonder whatever happened to "changing the channel"...it was certainly their mantra when the notion of censorship raised its lethal head on the subject of television violence, language, and sexuality.
This is not entirely accurate. If youtube was predominantly videos of nazis and porn, it would not be able to sell advertisements on the site. There is no commercial cost to not deleting a video, a comment or a tweet, but if the site becomes a turn-off to mainstream users, there is a cost to that, and even if it doesn't, some advertisers won't want their products advertised on it.
Firstly, youtube is not a predominantly nazi and porn video site - never has been, never will be. Such extremist examples do little to nothing to advance the discussion. If the earth were to smash into the sun in 10 seconds, we would all die. But it's not going to, so refraining from such nonsensical "arguments" would serve your interests better than absurd hypotheticals.
Secondly, there is an opportunity cost in deleting videos, tweets, posts, etc. Their elimination eliminates the corresponding ads that are served up with them, so there is in fact a very real cost in censorship.
As for turning off mainstream users and advertisers, it's never wise to underestimate the depths of poor taste that make fortunes. Ever heard of Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, SNL, or Hustler magazine?
Perhaps instead of seeking to dance mythical angels on the head of a hypothetical pin, you ought educate yourself a bit more on the subject of media, advertising, and appealing to the lowest common denominator - something the democratic party has been doing for decades now.
YouTube is so massive I really doubt they would feel much of a financial pinch from whacking Alex Jones or Dennis Prager.
People will watch anything-Yesterday I saw a profile of a teenager who has made a million dollars off Instagram, and she said her number one video was her boyfriend peeling an avocado in a weird way.
I actually didn't know that Prager videos were deleted. See that's just clearly a non-commercial decision right there. While I can understand why general circulation advertisers don't want their ads appearing on a video where Alex Jones makes some scurrilous claim that offends millions, something like Prager just doesn't have the same type of issue. It's not general circulation material like cat videos, but it's indistinguishable from most non-dramatic ideological content.
I'm afraid Dennis seems a little confused about the definition of censorship, but it does once again raises thorny issue about private groups like Twitter, Google and monetization.
"PragerU, the prolifically popular creator of conservative video content run by radio host Dennis Prager, claims that it is being censored by big tech. The organization took to Twitter to announce that the platform had banned it from running ads.
We've been completely banned from advertising on @Twitter.
Except that's not actually censorship. Far from it: A quick glance at the company's Twitter feed shows that it uses the platform to great advantage, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a bevy of tweets that drive mega-engagement. If PragerU was actually "censored" by Twitter, they would not have a Twitter platform at all.
The nonprofit, which is also prohibited from advertising on Spotify, has argued that such bans violate their right to free speech. But Twitter's advertising policies have nothing to do with the First Amendment, which protects PragerU from government action—not from the decisions of a private company."
Put that your account is a parody acct and it will buy you a week or so until some kid at Twitter sends you a message that says, “Hey! You aren’t making fun of Trump supporters.”
The problem with this particular apologist reasoning, is that it doesn't cost these social media titans anything to allow posts and keep accounts open. That's not how the internet and bandwidth work. In fact, it's the reverse. They actually generate MORE revenue / profit by allowing the lengthy fights and mudslinging and trolling.
attempting to lessen the toxicity of censorship by excusing it for profit is apologism at its most rank (imo).
You are correct however, on the issue of multiple masks (more accurate I think than agenda). The First Amendment was supposed to make pivoting with the winds and whims of tyrants unnecessary. Sadly, the cowards in both new and old media have long since surrendered the mantles of vanguard and the 4th Estate in favor of bigger yachts, planes, and private islands. They're under the misguided impression that one can compensate for a small dick with a big wallet and have forgotten that kings and dictators throughout history frequently confiscate wealth from the wealthy while pimping their wives in the state's brothels...
I think one of the reasons we need to keep addressing the issue is because we don't yet have the constitutional and legal framework to preserve free speech against censorship by private actors. I'm not sure we'll get these questions resolved for a while either.
Clarence Thomas just wrote an interesting opinion related to denial of cert in a case involving section 230. He made clear that he believes the court is going to have to address 230 in an appropriate case, and the question of private censorship by the huge social media platforms. He mused whether they should be treated like the phone company as a common carrier, and thus be prohibited from censoring. But really his point was SCOTUS is going to have to deal with this. Whether other justices will agree, who knows. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/clarence-thomas-blasts-section-230-wants-common-carrier-rules-on-twitter/
Not knowing at the time how fascism would work (the state collaborating with business to create a police state) the founders never imagined the State would simply work with private companies to circumvent The Constitution (3rd party doctrine with the 4th amendment, tech companies with the first). There are no protections in place for this.
To be honest, we often don't honor the 1st amendment even when the government encroaches directly on the 1st amendment. From hate crimes, to ads for illegal activities, to crime narrative being charged as a felony, the days of the Brandenburg vs Ohio "imminent lawless action" test is dead at the State and Appeals level for over a decade.
State and Appeals decision are full of "fire in a crowded building" language to punish language the state does not approve of, whether it actually promotes imminent violence or not.
That one only works if your case makes it to the Supreme's, and it almost certainly will not.
I stand corrected. You are of course, right. The Thomas statement is spot on. My contention however still stands that censorship is unacceptable - public or private - and the fools who think they can make billions and still censor at will are ignorant of history and what tyrants do (tyrants on the left or the right) to wealthy idiots with too much money and power.
Isn't there some warning about being careful who you step on while climbing the ladder? The hubris coming out of Silicon Valley may cost a head or two to roll - literally.
Manipulating partisan emotions is the best route to inject propaganda.
Trump has been the greatest gift in this regard: I can imagine no faster way to turn so-called liberals into CIA/FBI worshiping advocates for censorship. He's like a sheepdog that has herded fearful Democrats into the abbatoir.
Hardly, the effort to control the press was in full swing before Trump became president. Witness the 2016 Journolist group of journalists coordinating their stories to get maximum political advantage for Hillary Clinton.
Even earlier, there are Ben Rhodes shocking disclosure of how journalists he controlled were used to steer discussion of the Iran nuclear deal in a positive direction and eclipsing coverage of any negative aspects.
"It is a matter of simple fact that the British government employs a very large number of people whose full time job is to influence the political narrative on social media. The 77th Brigade of the British Army, the Integrity Initiative, MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ all run major programmes of covert online propaganda. These information warriors operate on twitter, facebook, and in comments sections across the internet.
"I have long been fascinated by the disconnect by which people, who do know and understand that the security services employ tens of thousands of people and have budgets of billions, nevertheless find it hard to accept that they may come personally into contact with their operations. Therefore when I state that the security services infiltrate groups including environmentalists and the SNP, and were involved in the Skripal story in ways not public, there is a peculiar desire among people to reject it as it is uncomfortable. Equally while people do know the security services are committing huge sums to social media influencing, to point out any of its instances brings derisive shouts of “conspiracy theory”."
Is anyone naive enough to believe the US government doesn't do the exact same thing?
Could you-or any interested party-figure out who the plant is on here or the MAGA4EVER Facebook group or 4chan or Silk Road 2.0 or wherever else the feds want to snoop?
All governments, all the time. Oddly, we fixate on "Russian interference" while ignoring British, French, Turkish, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Canadian, Mexican, Brazilian, ......
I think there’s a big logistical difference between surveillance and active participation.
I can believe active participation is happening against foreign adversaries (but probably not effectively). I’m skeptical it can happen domestically in any systematic way given the laws and risk aversion of bureaucrats. Domestic surveillance is another story.
I'm of the opinion that everything that intelligence does, whether known foreign or postulated domestic, impacts America.
Adam Curtis tells a story about Reagan. Evidently Reagan had read a book that said that all terrorism in the world was ultimately funded by Moscow. He approached Casey and told him to investigate the claims. Casey gave the book to his analysts for investigation. They quickly returned the book to Casey, telling him the book was useless because all the sources were black propaganda that the US created for inclusion in foreign media.
Casey chose to ignore them, instead finding a friendly academic to write the policy paper which greatly aided Reagan in ramping up the Cold War.
As far as your skepticism goes, I hope your right.
My point, I suppose, was more what if. What if cancel culture and all social media censorship hysteria is an entirely manipulated psychological operation designed to make left wingers embrace censorship under the guise of "social justice" while isolating an already paranoid right wing, thereby ensuring there will be no meaningful pushback by a unified populace, only an easily managed division and distrust?
I think your last paragraph might be the biggest piece of the pie. Intelligence agencies have been, to some degree more or less, but certainly TOO MUCH, pulling the strings of the country and the world for many, many decades. I think more people need to start considering that the intelligence agencies are running the show - some politicians and oligarchs are in on it while others are just pawns who believe what their minds are trained to believe.
I think a detached assessment will lead to seeing that both the Blues and the Reds were primed to flair up after the election whichever way the outcome went.
I think you need to spend some time with beltway IC bureaucrats and ask yourself if those kinds of people have the wherewithal to carry out the kind of plan you’re describing.
I misread your post as suggesting there wasn’t much surveillance domestically and thus put “NSA.” But I do think people are vastly underestimating the intelligence agencies.
I don’t see why anyone would assume the agencies become manifestly less competent just because they are within US borders. But even the operations that take place overseas are also controlling minds within the US to generate support. The problem is, of course we only find out when something goes wrong and the cover is blown or maybe when papers are declassified half a century later and nobody cares or what was done is considered acceptable to the present.
Anyone catch the blatant PBS / 60 Minutes smear against DeSantis regarding the vaccine rollout in Florida? Maybe Matt should interview the producers or the woman reporter who led the charge.
Yes, they still keep it real for the most part. The last thing I saw on Frontline was an expose of a sterilization program on female prison inmates-they asked them for consent when they were doped up for other surgeries/procedures.
Meanwhile Gov. Newsom is dining out with friends in fancy restaurants wondering why people are fleeing CA in droves. Gee, when you politicize even viruses..
That's a feature not a bug for the left; since fleeing Californians are mostly wealthy SJW parasite types who flee California but then immediately begin turning the states they flee (see Colorado, Georgia, and Texas) to into the same pozzed hellscapes California was turned into without bothering to give a fuck to look inwards and see that they are the reason California became "unlivable".
Plenty of cities and towns in California where you'd see the same sort of proud anti-mask stuff. It's just not the places most people associate with California (read: LA or SF). I find it incredibly tiring to read people who think they understand our state and likely have spent little if any time here.
Why should viruses be allowed to escape politicization? If you make that exception, you open the door for other things to follow - possibly even people. Nothing must be allowed to escape being politicized!
Science once meant freeing the mind from it's ingrained prejudices; now SCIENCE! is an authority, an oracle - the pronouncements of which must be received with reverence and awe. It might just as well have the stone head from Zardoz as the logo/mascot.
That's the first I've heard of it and unsurprisingly, all a google search comes up with is an endless list of debunk articles and videos.
It's not that I'd necessarily subscribe to such thinking, but I'd rather see it for myself than ONLY see what others think of it.
That's not an option here though.
Do I think COVID was "planned"? No.
Was it politicized and used as a cudgel to beat the masses into submission through economic hardship? Yes. Absolutely I think so.
Impeachment didn't work, the Russiagate narrative fell through without a peep and the economy was booming. All of it was backfiring on the establishment and NEWS FLASH! There's a deadly virus that requires lockdowns, absent voting and late vote counting and absolute controls over the workforce and their right to assemble.
Couple that with speech restriction, political morality policing and walling in the US capital as a fortress of solitude for Breznhev Biden and we have the raw ingredients simmering in a giant pot of smackdown.
We'll see, maybe. Since the exact origin of the virus is shrouded in mystery and propaganda, it's not possible at this time to say whether it was planned from the get go or not, or simply seen as a golden opportunity to implement authoritarian policies in the west. But the continued insistence on CCP lockdowns and masking despite mounting evidence these policies do more harm than good combined with the main beneficiaries of these policies being Big Pharma and Corps like Amazon/Walmart, not to mention the Chinese economy, indicate that there is a plan now that has little to do with public health. Bio-ID was brought up years ago, by Uncle Bill and Aunt Melinda, and this seems to be the end game now.
From the reading of many of your repetitive ill-informed narrative talking-points, it appears that "Boris", and numerous others have arrived at a similar conclusion, in that you seem to strive and live for the insignificance of vapid nonsense. May I be the first to congratulate you for achieving your status as a resident troll; you are not alone, simply one of the more obvious grantees of this distinction.
Stay safe, and try not to empathize with the
families and friends of the 500,000,000 plus of our fellow citizens who have fallen pray to this deadly malady, and besides, being a fool is more fun.....or IS IT?
"Questions would necessarily be asked about decisions to remove elderly ‘bed-blockers’ from NHS facilities into private ‘care homes’, about who issued clinical instructions not to use cheap and proven treatments, such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and who decided to force experimental and unproven medical treatments on to the entire population and to deny liberty and freedom to those who resist."
Basically now we have all the legacy/corporate/propaganda media lying and censoring 100% of the time, and most of the independent journalists devoting 95% of their time to watching the lying legacy/corporate/propaganda media lie and censor, and then writing about what they see there.
Meanwhile 99% of the population outside the political/media circles knows that 100% of the legacy media is lying all the time, is interested in true, timely reporting about real economic and social issues, and can't find it anywhere.
And something more recent:
https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/to-reason-with-a-madman/
(In a functioning democracy, the two sides could argue the question of whether the election was stolen by drawing evidence from mutually acceptable sources of fact. Today no such source exists. Most of the media has constellated into separate and mutually exclusive ecosystems, each the domain of a political faction, making it impossible to have a debate. All that’s left, as you may have experienced, is a shouting match. Without debate, one must resort to other means to achieve victory in politics: force rather than persuasion.
This is one reason why I think democracy is over. (Whether we ever had it, or how much of it, is another question.)
Suppose I wanted to persuade a far right Trump-supporting reader that claims of election fraud are baseless. I could cite reports and fact-checks on CNN or the New York Times or Wikipedia, but none of those are credible to that person, who assumes, with quite some justification, that these publications are biased against Trump. The same is true if you are a Biden supporter and I try to persuade you of massive election fraud. Evidence for that is only to be found in right-wing publications that you will dismiss out of hand as unreliable.
Let me save the indignant reader some time and write your scathing critique of the above for you. “Charles, you are establishing a false equivalency here that is shockingly ignorant of certain indisputable facts. Fact one! Fact two! Fact three! Here are the links. You are doing a disservice to the public by even broaching the possibility that the other side is worth listening to.”
When even one side believes that, we are no longer in a democracy. My point here isn’t to hold both sides equal. My point is that no conversation is happening, or can happen. We are past democracy now. Democracy depends on a certain level of civic trust, a willingness to decide the disposition of power through peaceful, fair elections informed by an objective press. It requires a willingness to engage in conversation or at least debate. It requires that a substantial majority hold something – democracy itself – to be more important than victory. Otherwise we are in a state either of civil war or, if one side is dominant, a state of authoritarianism and rebellion.
At this point it is clear which side has the upper hand. There is a kind of poetic justice in that the right wing – who perfected the information technology of hate-mongering and narrative warfare in the first place – is now its victim. Conservative pundits and platforms are rapidly being purged from social media, from app stores, even from the Internet entirely. In today’s environment, for me to even say this arouses suspicions that I myself am a conservative. I am quite the opposite. But like a minority of Left journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, I am appalled at the canceling, deplatforming, censoring, and demonizing of the right (including 75 million Trump voters) in what can only be called Total Information Warfare. In Total Information Warfare (as in military conflict) a key tactic is to make your opponents look as bad as possible. How can we have a democracy if we are being incited to hate each other by the very media we depend on to tell us what is real, what is “news,” and what the world is?
It looks today like the Left is beating the Right at its own game: the game of censorship, authoritarianism, and the suppression of dissent. But before you celebrate the expulsion of the Right from social media and public discourse, please understand the inevitable result: the Left will become the Right. This is already long underway, as the overwhelming presence of neocons, Wall Street insiders, and corporate champions in the Biden administration demonstrates. The partisan information warfare that began as a left-right conflict, with Fox on one side and CNN and MSNBC on the other, is rapidly reforming into a struggle between the Establishment and its challengers.
When Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Wall Street are on the same side as the military brass, the intelligence services, and the majority of government officials, it will not be long before those censored are those who disturb their agenda.
Glenn Greenwald makes the point well:
There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.)
Very well stated. What we have currently in the U.S. is a form of soft authoritarianism whereby anyone expressing a point of view outside the prevailing narrative of the ruling establishment risks being cancelled or deplatformed.
Establishment elites seemingly desire is to try to turn back the clock to the 1950s and 60s. This was a time when three major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), two wire services (AP and UPI) and a handful of newspapers (NYT, WaPo, Chicago Tribune, LA Times) and the Democrat and Republican Parties had almost complete control over the political narrative in the U.S. They are trying to make it the same now only the names have changed (e.g. Google, Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, etc.)
It worked back then because the U.S was a much more homogenous country, there was no alternative media and ordinary citizens had very few opportunities to express their political points of view.
It is telling to watch Senators and Members of the House hold hearing after hearing complaining about the power of the tech companies, yet nothing is ever actually done about it. It's obviously nothing more than pure political theater done to make it appear as though our reperesentatives care how the evil tech companies are censoring/silencing/deplatforming ordinary citizens. The political establishment on both sides of the aisle have no interest in doing anything other than complain because they all benefit tremenedously from tech company censorship and authoritarianism.
I can say conclusively that this is the best comment I've seen on this issue, ever. I'll be using it repeatedly to try to talk some sense into both my left and right friends.
Hyperbole. The Biden upset and charges of election malfeasance is a mirror image of Bush/Gore and Trump/Clinton. The pillar of politics that is Hillary Clinton still disputes the 2016 results.
We are divided down the middle and every election will be very close, hotly contested and the results disputed by the loser. It’s politicking. It’s messy democracy. It’s not authoritarianism, none of us are being disappeared.
You guys act like this is unprecedented. It isn’t.
Jeb! was the Governor of the state that called it for W. All the media conspired to move on. You don’t think dem Americans felt like a descent into authoritarianism was occurring as the Patriot Act made us all spy fodder and the Congress conceded constitutional authority to declare war to the President under a poorly written authorization which is still being used 20 years later.
Galleta on Apr6 @~9:30 PM PCT
The eight years of Bush-Cheney & the four years of Trump-Pence certainly make extraordinary historical book-ends for the eight
years of Obama-Biden have proven to be a stark lesson, one fostered a Congressional violation of the Constitutionally mandated preservation of the balance of power between the three branches of our federal government, by creating legislative authorization for the creation of a Unitary Executive; the new granted unconstitutional powers of which George W. Bush, under the tutelage of his puppet master Dick Cheney, gleefully signed into law. As Galleta has noted, The Supreme Court, along with twelve years of Republican administration and eight years of Democrat administration have chosen to simply embrace and continue this Constitutional miscarriage for "20 years". For those who may be interested in a simple measure of the expense to the public well-being of this incredibly destructive behavior. not even mentioning the literally millions of deaths and life-changing damage perpetrated by the Executive Branch and it's Defense Department with no Congressional or Judicial oversight. The undeniable existing evidence of the magnitude of this single facet of the unconstitutionally acquired Unitary Executive enhancement is the twofold increase in the building and operation of literally several hundreds of new full-service military base installations around the world. The amazing research and writing of the late Chalmers Johnson-professor emeritus deals thoroughly with this incredible and wanton squandering of human lives and our national treasure in his book "The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic"; the first edition published in 2004.
Sorry for the digression from Matt's topic. If it made anyone angry, just remember those two important ingredients in life as described by the American novelist/humorist Tom Robbins
1) Everything is part of it.
and
2) It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
As Usual,
EA
I had a happy childhood as a child, I highly recommend it, one has the whole rest of their lives for angst about major problems they can hardly affect.
I played stupid inside the group/ outside the group games in high school. I tired of them and moved on as soon as possible.
I know how behavior mod programs work and am appalled educators and govt leaders are encouraging fiscal irresponsibility with the idea that consequences will be shielded just to juice their abnormal growth addiction, are denying the need for accuracy, specificity and consistent process to achieving predictable, reliable results and approach social justice from a king of the hill mindset instead of a rising tide approach.
Re: Galleta on Apr 7 @~noon PCT
Thanks for replying to my garbled unresponsive mess of a non-reply. I hope you didn't feel that my feeble attempt to save it by concluding with the Tom Robbins reference, was meant in any fashion as a personal affront. I totally agree with your observation that "...one has the whole rest of their lives for angst about major problems they can hardly affect." By the way, the reference came from the ending of his book "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues", it's a great read. (:-}
This "angst" you reference is, I suspect, directly related to this topical issue of Matt Taibbi's concern, as well as his first post in his new series, which I was about to open when I noticed your reply in my inbox.
I was, and remain very interested in your earlier reference to the beginnings of the Bush v Gore debacle in Florida during the Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris malfeasance, and the ensuing 20 years of equally disturbing state and federal government misfeasance.
For now, I'm going to read Matt's new offering, and look forward to further understanding and comity in the solving of our problems that, as you so cogently expressed it, "...problems they can hardly affect."
As Usual,
EA
Would consistent 10% growth/returns that didn’t create bubbles and encourage instability be so terrible economically?
Oh. Look. They are talking about the VIX
Corporate media came into being at around the same time as the totalized (fascist) state. Media reverting to what it always was in the past - politically biased - is quite natural I think. Most newspapers in the past carried their political leaning in their names. How many newspapers around the country have the word "Democrat" in their title, as an example?
How is bringing back big media a laudable goal?
I don't know buddy. CNN used to be an entirely repetitive parade of the same stories recapped every half hour that only changed if a major story happened. Now it's a screen full of talking heads yammering at, over & through each. Gives me a fucking headache.
Geez, all social media is comprised of an army of obsessive phone addict wankers who retweet stories they agree with or belittle stories they don't. They're not journalists.
Or maybe they are and our fake definition of journalists as nonpartisan just has to change. In the past, reporting always had a partisan edge to it, even if we can't detect it today because our issues are not their issues.
What if we all ignored Twitter and let the powerless there spout off all they wanted? We manage to do the same with the gossip columns on Page 6 and at the Walmart/supermarket checkout. It has about the same relevance.
This is precisely what most of us are doing. 2/3 of the country lacks a college degree. Whoever finds overarching issues around their concerns, and organizes around those, can dominate. Neither of our major parties prioritizes truly helping them. The field is open, start organizing; primarily in person.
I think the Rs actually have an advantage. The left has set up such a labyrinth of speech codes that they'll ruin their careers if they manage to effectively talk to a group of working class people.
"The left has set up such a labyrinth of speech codes that they'll ruin their careers if they manage to effectively talk to a group of working class people."
Very well put.
I would pay a dollar or so to watch some regular working class people react to a woke lecture.
Instead, declare the social media common carriers and insert a regulatory mechanism to make sure they stop making content choices. The whinging will stop after a while and people will get used to it. Let media do whatever it wants to do.
This. Alphabet is ConEd or whatever on steroids-treat them like it!
Other than giving lip service to this solution, why would the ruling class do this when the tech companies and big media can carry water for this tactic (per GG quote in Eisenstein's piece)?
Mainly because not doing so ends up losing mindshare ultimately. Absent (or even with) jackbooted thugs to threaten, people will find their samizdat. The state media becomes useless except as the butt of jokes. Wait, these people are stupid enough to do this.
Matt, next they will criticize you for “both-sidesism”. With each pair you publish, both sides will accuse you of equating their grand heroic martyr with an evil enemy of humanity. There is truly no pleasing the little tyrants all over the internet.
Anyway, appreciate your work brother, keep being true to yourself.
Isn’t the voguish term whataboutism?
When you point out the critic’s team is as guilty of doing what they are criticising their opponents for they dismiss the comment as “whataboutism”.
Thus making a virtue of what used to be termed hypocrisy all while being able to ignore the observation.
I think silencing political opposition as well as random individuals with differing opinions -- there's a difference --is far more prevalent on the left. Surveys confirm that a third of Americans are fearful of expressing their opinions; those least afraid of doing so are on the left. Others stay quiet for a reason: lost jobs, lost relationships, lost reputations. Was the curator in San Francisco who ventured to say that he would continue to buy pieces by white artists right wing? The Twitter-mobbed and humiliated Asian-American reporter forced to apologize because he dared quote a black man who said there would be no outcry if a black, instead of a white, had killed the same person? Is J.K. Rowling right wing for politely but firmly refusing to deny biological fact? There is nothing comparable to widespread CRT indoctrination. A trend conflates traditionally normal, liberal values, especially speech, with "conservative" or "right wing." I am no fan of either party. I did find it ironic that the most full-throated defense of American history, and the most effective sacking of the fraudulent Project 1619, came from the World Socialist Web. No one should be silenced.
WSW did a fine job dismantling the 1619 Project, but that's because they're Trotskyists who insist that human history is driven by class oppression rather than race oppression. They have a dog in the fight.
Of course it was partly self- interest, but not entirely; it didn't have to be nearly as full-throated to make the point. A deep respect for history, maybe country, maybe both, shone through those pieces. Who knew? That's speech. That's why it matters.
You're right, the effort does deserve respect. And one of the main spokespeople, Andre Damon, is surprisingly interesting, coming from such a radical group, with which I agree on almost nothing.
Exactly. Your remark exemplifies what America is, and what we stand to lose.
How 40% of young people could believe it is ok to restrict free speech and give its governing to a small body of CEOs is beyond my understanding. How could they not understand the history of this in reigns like Mao and Stalin. The free speech issue is probably one of the most important issue clouded by partisan politics but it is certainly not the only one. We just lived through 12 months of a pandemic which certainly was and I am very afraid we will live through decisions around our national energy strategy which will be also be deeply impacted by partisan politics and then in turn drive us further apart. God help our nation.
I can answer your question: It's because they don't know any of that history. I recently taught a class at a pretty good (top 25%) law school, where all my students but one didn't really know who Stalin or Mao were (Stalin was vaguely familiar as a WWII leader).
What is so shocking about this is that Stalin and Mao are NOT ancient history.
You can't have any decent understanding of the world today without knowing who they were and what they did. Mao's giant photo is still displayed on Tiananmen Square, for pete's sake.
I took ten minutes to fill them in. Five-year plans, collectivization, purges, gulag, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution: blank stares to all of it.
I agree with you. If you don’t understand Mao you cannot understand the world today
Did they respond by toppling statues and spray painting "NAZIS" on everything?
Somewhat to my surprise, at a liberal law school with a significant leftist element, no one seemed to dispute that communism was bad, no one reported me for making them feel unsafe after I discussed the pile of bodies that ideology has left behind, and they gave me kind course evaluations. So maybe all is not lost. I'm going into teaching very late in my career and didn't know what to expect.
They lacked having been taught this history and they lack living history too. The answer you gave to the "why" is correct: They don't know any better. Why don't they know any better? Depending on the topic, they haven't learned or seen any different. The same thing is true on criminal justice. "Kids today" have only lived in the super-safe era where they have no cares at all walking around Manhattan, but they do see the negatives of the system that buys them that.
Sometimes, sadly, we re-learn the lessons of history. It's both scary and reassuring. It just takes a few woke 20 somethings getting carjacked to wake them up to the problems with some of their deeply held ideas, and then the pendulum will swing back.
Good point. What most of the significant leftist element (of the past) - not the neoliberal order of the last 30 years or so in academe, used to believe is NOT that communism was the way forward but the cold war tactic of equating everything in opposition to capital as "communist" was wrong and inaccurate.
Socialism is not necessarily the road to communism. And there is something to be said about having a balance between equal forces (capital and labor) with both institutions playing important roles in society. The problem becomes when one is undermined, made to be subservient and allows the other to dominate society.
And when we look at the last two periods of dominance (1947-1970 - dominance of Keynesian economics, labor, full employment etc.. and the Neoliberal turn 1971 to present), we see who benefits and who does not.
In the first scenario, we had the golden era of economics in this country (mostly for white middle class families) where workers got paid a good wage, could afford housing, and save for retirement. In the other scenario, we have an entire class of billionaire and wannabees who have gutted the economy and our social fabric of society via finance to create monopolies, oligopolies and the largest spread of inequality between different classes in our history.
So painting the demon as socialism = communism was an overt strategy by the intelligence communities of the post WW2 America plus very conservative John Birch types.
Re: Skeptic on Apr 6 @~4PMpct
It's good to see you on this thread "Skeptic". I first encountered your commenting when you mentioned that while attending, or maybe post-attendance of, law school you moved from liberal to conservative leanings. You mention herein that this "liberal law school" you taught a course at had "..a significant leftist element,". It does not appear, from the reaction to your class, by the students or faculty, that you were teaching in some extremist left-wing university environment that was, covertly or overtly, doing anything but providing a balanced educational environment without any fringe left or right wing emphasis.
I continue to believe that it is the fanatical-extremist-fringe elements of our society that exist, as the name infers, on the extreme fringes of every political persuasion. As we all are presently experiencing, they are the loudest, the most inconsiderate, the most reckless, and not surprisingly usually the most uninformed in our collective midst. Sadly, in modern parlance, they are presently garnering the most "clicks"; and therefore attracting the attention of the grifters in our society who are competing for ways to monetize these unhinged behaviors, the public good, health, peace, and safety be damned.
I would have absolutely loved to attend that class of yours; I taught Cultural Anthropology for 35 years, so welcome aboard good sir.
As Usual,
EA
Neither is 9/11, but ask your average high school or college student about it now.
You should have mentioned the Khmer Rouge too. Go google 'bas reliefs khmer rouge' and view some of the images. Powerful and haunting stuff. Kids need to see it to believe it.
Just shocking
By the way, my students were half Americans and half Latin Americans, so it's not just the US educational system that's leaving huge gaps.
Very sad
Because we did a good job of hammering home the evils of Nazi/Fascism but pretty much ignored the graveyard of Communism. Our intellectuals were horrified by the Nazis but were enthralled by Trotsky/Lenin, Mao & Castro et.al.
I really believe the intellectuals that drive our cultural & media institutions believe that bloodshed for the greater good is noble, so they’ll defend it no matter what.
Indeed. I use a test for my lefty friends around when I meet them to gauge where they exist on this spectrum. I bait the hook by asking them what they think about Noam Chomsky. If they indicate they're big fans, I dangle the baited hook in front of them and ask if they know that Chomsky and other, similar intellectuals at the time were active apologists for the Khmer Rouge genocide whilst it was happening and that to this day Chomsky refuses to apologize for his actions.
If they deny it I show them the receipts and out of the many times I've done this (probably over 30), only one person acknowledged it and disavowed Chomsky. Everyone else did the predictable thing that Chomsky did, which was say it was BS and pivot immediately to "it was all America's fault, anyway." We dismiss Maoist tactics at our peril.
Not to be too revolutionary, but what if we regained the ability to say that some people were very wrong about some things, while being very right about some other things? Almost any ideological "these things/people are 100% good, these others are 100% bad" pattern leads to trouble. There's a great demand now, everywhere, that every story be a simple story with a Hero and a Villain.
The ends of totalitarianism never justify the means. Both commies-$$$/class warfare and Nazis/fascists-race/nationalism would disagree with this-their end is all.
I'm with KDBD on their points and yours. That was really the point of my test. I'm sure you have lefty (and righty) friends like me who are enamored with their own unshakeable beliefs around their politics. The Chomsky test has always been a way for me to show that even people that one thinks are the heroes in the story have flaws. It's also a way of personalizing things, because the Khmer Rouge genocide is personal to me - I've been to Cambodia several times and have friends there and here that literally grew up in the shadow of the genocide. I've been to the Killing Fields. I've been to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I met Chum Mey and spoke with him directly about his experience.
To this day it still burns me that Chomsky essentially got away with his casual, imperious apologia about the Khmer Rouge. Almost no one talks about it anymore to the point that the talk of Chomsky on the left has become reverent and hagiographic. Is he a hero of the left? Certainly. But my last sentence stands - we dismiss Maoist tactics at our peril. The Khmer Rouge were an even more depressing endpoint than the Maoists, but the same ideas apply - rigid policing of language, rigid policing of class status, rigid policing of how one can exist in society. It's the flip side of the fascism coin, and the reality is that there is a straight line from the woke nonsense occurring right now to 1960's China and 1970's Cambodia.
While it hardly compares to the Khmer Rouge, the Shah's government or Marcos in the Phillippines were hardly exemplars of liberal governance to feather the cap of the Nixon or Reagan Administrations. Both of those guys are heroes today to certain folks. Nixon being an unexpected one, remembering how he was viewed in the 80s, let's say.
Mind you, I think Chomsky is an ass.
Agreed. I think both men had complicated legacies. I'm not a fan of Reagan, whose history has been rewritten as hagiography and a lot of his administration's mistakes have been conveniently papered over because of the mythology Republicans wish to foist on him. Nixon - now there's a fascinating President. Truly corrupt and an actual, verified criminal, he was also responsible for normalizing relations with China and instrumental in the creation of the DNR and EPA and ending the draft. But a hero, either of them? Agreed, certainly not.
Your comment on how Khmer-Rouge is personal to you is a very important one. I don’t think I had much of an idea of how bad Mao was until it became personal for me(I started having people work for me that were directly impacted by Mao and my husband had an office report to him out of China and close personal friends there. All of a sudden what happened in China became very real and we started really studying why we were seeing what we are seeing.
It's an excellent point that I wish more people understood. It's amazing how folks' opinion on LGBT can change when one finds out one's son is gay, or on abortion when one's 16 year old daughter finds out she's pregnant. It's also a big reason why I am a huge proponent of world travel and meeting people who are from or live in other countries.
My fellow Americans who don't connect with those folks or don't travel internationally (a truly staggering percentage, unfortunately) love to complain endlessly about how horrible living in the US is, and I would love for them to learn and understand the myriad experiences of those who don't live here or are not from here, because they will tell you almost to a person that we Americans won the cosmic lottery by being born here. Additionally, there has never, ever been a better time to be alive.
I give Nick Krystof from the NYT a lot of credit on this front. Even though he is an uber progressive, he also says yearly that this current year is always the best year in history for the average world citizen, even at the same time he is decrying the poverty in this and other countries.
All to say, the people who escaped Mao and the Khmer-Rouge understand in a way that we cannot of how good we have it.
I like my hero vs villain story as much as the next person. But that is very rare and even when it happens the villain or hero can still have faults. We are human. It is clear to me that neither side of the political spectrum is either all hero or all villain and the only way for our country to not fall is for us to engage productively but in this age of all right or all wrong I sometimes lose hope this will happen. I actually in the end don’t blame the youth. I blame their teachers and our leaders who are self serving and egotistical
Boy I agree with that My paternal side was republicans and my maternal were democrats. They had heated discussions but loved each other and could admit when the other side was wrong. My Father sometimes crossed over to Democratic and my Mother a bit more rarely to Republican but that does not exist now.
Your last sentence is really true
Pretty awful if true
I think we can likely track it back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who’s philosophy was directly linked to the bloody French Revolution. This crap is still playing out to this day.
I tell my children constantly that I see common elements today with what happened in the French Revolution. Not sure they believe it
You'd need a good guillotine.
😀
And that’s why George Orwell is an international political/intellectual icon these days and Hemingway is basically a character from a Jimmy Buffet song.
I use to think George Orwell was over the top in imagining what could ever happen in the US. Now I am not as sure. I put our my faith in the judiciary system and a few leaders across the spectrum willing to take a stand.
Awful
Did not know he repented
Oh come on... Germany's new age before WWII was championed by the youth and seen as being worlds ahead of the old establishment... The Kaiser never flew to ten rallies in a day like Rudolf Hilter did, and didn't understand how to use modern media to get a "message" out there.
Fast forward to China in the 70s, and again it was the youth that were whipped up enough to go dragging landlords out on the streets for the New People's Rebellion.
It's always the same, and always ends with having to shoot your way out of it.
At least wokesters are scared of firearms.....
I have never felt particularly strongly one way or the other about the second amendment for the first 40 years of my life. The last decade I have seen it’s importance. I am still not a fanatic about it but definitely see it’s potential to be a deterrent
Exactly-a deterrent. Do I, personally, know anyone who has a good reason to own 27 AR-15s-no, but I support their right to do so. I do, however, know or have met plenty of service professionals-HVAC, tow truck, real estate,etc-who carry weapons and have had cause to use them as a potential deterrent-not shooting anyone, but letting the individuals in the situation know they were carrying.
I don't concealed carry though there is constitutional carry in my state. I rely on my much more gun-freaky neighbors to take care of that. At least a quarter do.
The point is, when i'm in a convenience store or a restaurant, if someone tries to hold the place up, they can and do expect a hail of gunfire. Mission accomplished, I say.
I was hoping for better as I believe that our youth should be better educated as a whole about the dangers of this.
“Shoot your way out of it”. Not too encouraging. I hope it does not come to this.
They can believe that as the level of education in the US is abysmal. And that goes from kindergarten to Ph.D. programs. The sheer amount of bigotry in those institutions is horrifying.
That they are not teaching about two of the most horrifying and repressive reigns in human history is a crime we will all suffer from.
Maybe not. Maybe they would have used it as a roadmap
Good God. That is a frightening thought. I struggle to find a way to counter this.
That is a dark POV but a bit funny in a dark way.
I think that is true but I also say I don’t think I learned most of what I know about Mao, Stalin in school. I think I picked it up via news and movies and hearing my parents talk about it. My mother in particular introduced awareness of Stalin and the fear we had about nuclear holocaust potential tended to push me to learn more. So I think it is the schools but it is more then that
Schools rarely touch upon Stalin or Mao. Mao's only mentioned as the guy who took charge of China when it went red and the guy in charge of China when Nixon went over there to restore relations. And Stalin is treated as a dullard dictator (who's evil has ALWAYS been whitewashed to just vagaries) who Hitler bullshitted then backstabbed, forcing us to ally with him and eventually took over eastern europe in the aftermath of WW2.
This is quite truth-students get some “Stalin bad” for 5 minutes, but nothing like the 2 weeks of History Channel-Schindler’s List Nazi porn. Mao-who’s that!?!?!
Nazi porn isn't even descriptive enough. The sources you cite do to the historical record what wokesters do to today's news. Everything the Nazis did, mostly was done ...better is the wrong word for hateful things, "more vigorously" is closer to the truth - by others. There is very little that was exceptional about the Nazi state except inasmuch as they were used as a diversion from other nations antisemitism, embrace of eugenics, ethnic cleansing, etc.
Hollywood prefers pics about Hitler over Mao/China. Because when you try to sell that stuff in China...well, you can't. That's a lot of lost ticket revenue. Germans are happy to lap up more criticism of Hitler and movies about bad Russians sell well everywhere. Follow the money. Kind of like the NBA's stance on China. Not good for business. So you get lots of exposes about Fascist Germany, Russian super villains. But China?
Yes we need a good movie based on the Gulags and other horrors of the Soviet Union
This is the exact point my son makes when I talk to him about this. But where are our intellectuals.
Ok. While I don’t agree with restricting free speech, you have nonetheless inspired me to learn more about Mao and Stalin.
The estimates of deaths under Mao are between 50-80 million. Some put as high as 100 million. Under Stalin the estimates are between 25-30 million. But deaths are only part of what they did to decimate their country. Some offer up the excuse for Mao that the majority of the people died because of bad policy but that is not really the whole truth. When he took power over the next 5 years 4-6 million people were outright killed or died because they were sent to labor camps. Much the way Hitler did. But the terror he created during this time kept people from ever contradicting what future policy which then resulted in another 45-70 million deaths. He is often listed as the number 1 or 2 deadly leader of all time. A key plank in both Stalin and Mao was the absence of free speech. Something happened between 1900 and 1940 that created 3 of the most deadly leaders of all time, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. We teach our children about the horrors of the Nazi reign and that is correct but we do little to also teach about Stalin and Mao to our own detriment. I had people work for me that was sent to one of the labor camps and we have a good friend whose father was in one. They were just as devastating as Hitlers concentration camps and Stalin’s Siberia camps.
I picked up my copy of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West by Niall Ferguson, just because it is here, and started reading sections of it. It’s very fascinating so far. There’s an interesting paragraph that I want to come back and share with you tomorrow.
If you consider things like the famines in China and the Holodomor in Ukraine, the numbers cited are rather low. Khrushchev's 27 million death toll cite for WWII in Russia also must be factored in. Not every death was caused by German action, many were caused by the Soviet authorities taking actions they thought appropriate, analogous to the internment of the Japanese in the US, but more deadly. If you just cite 100 million killed by Communism, one is underestimating but in a safe way.
It's hilarious how many commenters are just ignoring the crux of this post (or, you know, just the title of the post) and retreating into "actually, the left does it more." It's not a victimhood competition.
The "left" they descry is actually the far right.
More evangelical than the morality police of the 1980s
The competition for victim status is intense - thus intersectionality has to disentagle who is the most victimized from those of lesser. I think we should really refer to it as the great teeter-totter of oppression.
White female journalists are staking a claim for the title.
Points for including "intersectionality"! I have been working on a phrase or comment that includes "intersectionality", "disproportionally, and "historically" in one sentence - that, I think, would pretty much sum up conversation in the 21st Century - so far, anyway ...
"Equity?"
Being a victim of the cisheteropatriarchy!
Re: sasinsea on Apr 6 @~3PM pct
It's both "hilarious" and very sad, especially in terms of the selective method of reading employed to evidently prop up some uninformed narrative rather than comprehensively allowing themselves to be informed by what is actually/factually being said. I thought Matt, as usual, did an excellent job of explaining the focus of his new upcoming series; and summed up his REASONING for doing it beautifully in his closing paragraph.
"Ten years from now, people will likely not have trouble realizing that putting five or six companies in charge of regulating all content was probably not a good idea, for all but a small handful of empowered actors. At the moment, the partisan angle is clouding the issue, as ordinary people are being conned into viewing speech as a giant turf war in which they have a rooting interest. News flash: you probably don’t."
How can this level of intellectual clarity and honesty be so blindly misconstrued and deconstructed????{:-(
It's good to see, and comprehensively read, you again.
As Usual,
EA
Obliged EA---One of the reasons I actually comment here (and rarely elsewhere) is people are generally thoughtful and I've had my mind changed once or twice and had some bogus info I thought was right patiently deconstructed.
Firmly believe the Brandeis line about that the answer to "bad" speech is "more speech, not enforced silence." No idea why anyone would root for other people being silenced just because they've been convinced someone else's politics are "dangerous." Have noticed the trend with a few of my more "I identify as a Democrat!" type friends and it sucks. They're still receptive to the counterargument but who knows for how long?
Self-righteousness - the idea that you are right and because you are right you are good/pure and because you are good/pure you are safe (which is what the ego wants more than anything else) - this is one the most seductive (and unfortunately reductive) mental modalities in the world. It is the modality that has driven all religious wars and oppressions and all of the politically driven slaughters. Rightness. What is going on right now is pretty similar (excepting we haven't seen a huge amount of state sponsored killings just yet).
I can't believe I am saying this having fled from fundamentalist Christianity in my young adulthood, but I am actually finding Christianity and Christians to be more tolerant than the regressive left - because they have the concept of redemption and forgiveness present in their doctrine. This and the fact that they don't single out a particular group for having sinned and fallen short. It's everyone.
Of course there are more extreme sects and beliefs - evangelicals will always be with us ;-). But your garden variety Christian, in our modern era, is typically pretty tolerant.
I wonder how many on the left *are* actually these "no mistakes ever" types, the snitchy assholes that no one can stand and who orient everything through their narrow view of the world. My hope is that they're what you alluded to---equivalently evangelical Christians, but for their politics. The loudest, shittiest people tend to get all the pub and I genuinely haven't come across this sort of person in the real world. Because, as you said, while religion is obviously a magnet for whackjobs and zealots, I find the vast majority of Christians to be decent, regular people. Most of my friends are pretty far left and don't behave in the gross ways you're reacting against. Hoping that's the case for most people. Hard to tell, especially having been pretty isolated for the year this kind of thing has really started to metastasize.
Wish I could be a fly on the wall some days. These are truly interesting questions. And it's probably true that many who lean left aren't radicals. But both social media and the MSM showcase the loudest, angriest voices—because it makes them rich, richer, richest. Note Matt's recent article regarding how media profits are down and how they are seeking a new "Trump" that they can sell. It's an ugly business.
Beyond that, I think the web and social media in particular is giant amplifier for our psyches. People can express without filters (id) more easily due to both anonymity and lack of physical proximity to their audience. It used to take quite a bit of effort to be seen and heard on a broader scale. Now, you just turn on your computer and you can express to potential millions with a few clicks. Think of what that does to the human ego.
Remember the movie "Mean Girls?" The whole point was that popularity gives people license to be a**hats. IOW, it goes to their heads. And they very often leverage this power to engage in self-aggrandizement, peer pressure tactics and bullying. I think this tendency combined with an earnest desire to shortcut to a perfect world makes people (impatient, young people in particular) more susceptible to these shallow ideologies that promise utopia if everyone will just get on board.
So the effort to sell the ideas ramps up. And selling often involves pressure - coercion, gaslighting, bullying, misrepresentation, inciting fear, seed of doubt tactics, etc. Add to this a desire on the part of oppressed groups for some revenge (or at least schadenfreude) against the culture that caused them harm. Add to this the constant barrage of advertising messaging the feeds our narcissistic egos and promises us that if we spend enough money we will have perfect lives where we don't have to work hard to get everything we want. Add to this a huge population of highly educated but unemployed young people with lots of leisure time.
Honestly, modern culture is kind of a mess. All of the old mores, values, and belief structures that used to provide some kind of framework or grounding are fragmenting and losing moral authority - justifiably so in many cases because they engaged in discriminatory behavior. It's sort of a perfect storm. Impatient young people in pursuit of utopia are throwing the baby out with the bath water. What's mystifying is that the adults in the room are abetting this behavior. That's what I don't get. That's why it is so powerful and spreading so fast. Is it white guilt? Maybe.
I think there is a deep well of white guilt in this country. My own experiences growing up in white culture in this country have illuminated the fact that white culture exhibits a tendency to avoid dealing with things head on. It sweeps things under the rug. It places a huge priority on "propriety"—what is allowed and not allowed to be addressed or expressed publicly, even privately. I was abused as a child and no one in my family will discuss it—which isolates me and makes me pariah when I do try to discuss it. And if you don't bring things into the light, they can't be healed. So, it stagnates in our subconscious and never gets addressed or healed or dealt with. And it becomes guilt. Because we know what is right and wrong. We just know. And all of our fancy rationalizations and outright lies (denials) don't change this truth.
I don't believe that every white person is racist or personally culpable for racism. However, there was a concerted effort by certain segments of white culture in the 20th century to destroy communities that were creating black wealth and to prevent black families from building generational wealth through various institutional obstacles placed in their way. They were denied the ability to join the quest for the American Dream. Imagine if you had watched your family struggle across generations - working hard, keeping their noses clean, following all of the rules - only to be pushed down and denied advancement (that they had rightly earned) or to be proscribed to certain menial roles/jobs (like black women as poorly paid nannies/maids in the old south) on top of Jim Crow proscriptions. Resentment and despair would build. And you would be tired and demoralized. And then Uncle Sam comes along and says I can solve all of your problems and gives you housing and a monthly stipend for living plus extra for kids - particularly kids with no father around? You wouldn't see that as a trap. You would see it as an opportunity to get a break for a change—not realizing the long-term impact on your family and culture.
This is our sin. I want very much to be able to support efforts to lift up and heal black culture in this country. I just can't support CRT and the way it's being done now. You can't shame and dehumanize people and expect a better world to result. It just won't work. And I am very interested in what WILL work. I am a pragmatist. But a romantic, too. “I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.” —MLK
I just refuse to become an ugly or mean person to achieve this. It must come from the better angels of our nature or it won't stick. Hate never won nuthin'.
Imagine learning one day that your spouse is okay with censorship when someone says that it is misinformation. In this case, you are the conservative and your spouse is a Democrat. Then, you go off for an hour or two on how liberal values around our civil liberties is what unites Americans. But at the end of the conversation, your still not sure if you made any difference. It is fucking depressing.
My wife doesn't get it either, but she's not a Democrat. I'm trying desperately to avoid a generalized conclusion here. People in general do not think out these things very well. I'd be anti-democratic except for that Churchill bit about worst forms of government.
It is possible that my wife has always held these views but it has never come up before. It is also possible that she has been influenced by talking heads in the recent past.
I enjoy speaking with her about political issues because she is very adept at challenging me and providing me with an alternative point of view. But she doesn't appreciate that dialog as much as I do.
In the not too distant past, some outspoken members of the religious right were proponents of censoring content that they viewed as salacious and immoral. I considered them to be an outlier but I could be wrong.
I assumed that we, as a society, were well past the point where censorship would be considered to be a valid response to dissenting views by a mainstream audience. It feels like I have woken up to an alternate reality but it is possible that it has always been like this and I am the one who is the outlier.
The problem with democracy, in the abstract, is that democratic institutions are often never established or respected, before democratic elections take place.
Look at the difference between Singapore and Egypt. Both are former British possessions that gained independence post WWII. Singapore was basically a dictatorship under Lee Kwan Yew-but they also had very strict property rights laws and a judiciary that was considered effective and independent. Democratic institutions were strongly established despite a lack of electoral democracy-and have continued to this day.
Egypt, otoh, had none of these things, and when the Arab Spring happened in the wake of the Mubarak regime, the Egyptians promptly elected the Muslim Brotherhood into power, who, in the lack of any meaningful checks in the form of the courts or respected legal barriers, promptly started doing what fundamentalist whack jobs do and necessitated a military coup to stop violence against Christians and generally unpleasant jihadi type actions. Singapore had strong democratic institutions despite a lack of electoral democracy, whereas Egypt didn’t and completely spit the bit as a society and n the wake of their very first democratic elections.
I'm pretty sure there are paid trolls in the comment section, and I suspect some of what you're seeing is partisan shills sewing dissent.
*sowing dissent. I wish there was an edit button.
As I just posted elsewhere, some of this has to do with what you read/watch - people see it happen to their side because that is what they are tuned into.
No doubt about that, bud. But the entire post is about how this isn't really an issue of left/right. It's an issue of corporate power. The idea that Facebook or Google are "leftist" organizations is hilarious.
Except that Democrat Inc. includes a bunch of corporations, all of Hollywood/Entertainment, a good deal of media minus the Rupert Murdoch owned Fauxtainment television & all of academia. You can call it any name you want, the “left”, neo-liberal, liberal establishment but it’s all a wing of the DNC. Any kind of power the Republicans ever had is a fading one, i.e. fossil fuels, construction, military ect... Evej the Nat Sec. is currently coming up to the woke sect of the dems with their Critical Social Justice movement in the military.
So, sorry, anyone “standing up” to the meany Republicans thinking they’re speaking “Truth to Power” is delusional!
I saw this on Twitter so I’ll paste it here because it fits this whole corporate woke era we’re living in:
“ Never in human history a “resistance/revolution” of anything was backed by mainstream media outlets, government, academia, & the art world at the same time.
If your ideas are backed by the media, the gov, academia, & the art world it’s safe to say that you are the status quo.”
You seem to be assuming I think the the parties are indicative of what "left" or "liberal" or "right" or "conservative" mean. They aren't. They're actually far more similar than they are different, both wholly committed to trade policies that have hollowed out the working class, wars of choice, fealty to their donor classes, and on and on.
You want to argue that the big tech is more pro-DNC than pro-GOP? Sure, we can do that. I'd probably agree though there are some interesting counterarguments. But again: the idea that these parties are standins for any coherent ideology isn't one I'm gonna go along with, nor is the idea that the GOP is somehow a "fading" power in this country. They aren't. They're part of the establishment uniparty with the same goals. Chances are, those goals aren't yours or mine.
It happens in plain sight.
TYT for example, a group of unknowns take on reporting the outrages and injustices of the day.
Enter a 20 million dollar grant.
Cenk endorses Hillary. Bahahahahaha
I always find the notion that Hollywood is so “leftist” funny. Take sex out of it and it doesn’t look so “left.”
I realize the point about corporate power, my point was to your point about people whining about who does it more - if you don’t follow leftist publications you won’t know about the effect on them and vice versa.
<<Take sex out of it and it doesn’t look so “left.”>>
I am wracking my brains trying to think of an actually sexy Hollywood movie that has come out in the last 40 years. RISKY BUSINESS maybe, but it's all about how sex (and everything else) is subsumed by neoliberal capitalism, rendering it anti-sexy. Limp.
I nominate "Almost Famous". If you don't like that, then how about "Boogie Nights". Both of them have the feature of being historical films about the 1970s (and 80s in Boogie Nights' case).
"historical films about the 1970s (and 80s in Boogie Nights' case)"
...possibly supporting my vague, ill-defined point?
Whatever happened to Heather Graham, anyway? Hollywood starlets seem to have a shelf life of +/-5 years. Guess not every girl gets to be Meryl Streep.
People who think Hollywood is "left" should read the stories about how the military consults on basically every movie they're tangentially involved in before they can keep making that argument.
And yeah---we're in agreement on these for sure. Example: I knew about the WSWS deprecations but not about a few of the other folks Matt has highlighted. Been instructive learning more.
This is true of the entire US paramilitary branch, to include the police too. Hollywood has always been in bed with the State because to them it's simply business.
Half the posts I see here (and skip) are victimization posts revolving around whataboutsisms versions if "who is the REAL (Fill in grievance here).
It's tiring and sad. It also creates a great opening to take down central principles in a partisan fashion. It's the very thing that resulted in Mr. Taibbi's "Miserable" need to post censorship in pairs.
It's all seems pretty "but Mom, he touched me first,!!!" but if it gets a few extra people to focus more on our shared loss of liberty than their grievance dopamine bump from playing the victim I guess it's worth it.
Spot on - reversion to the "meanies" :)
Censorship is only one face of a two-sided coin, the other side being the increasing deliberate manipulation and distortion of new stories by the mainstream press, as we saw recently when it surfaced 60 Minutes/CBS deliberately distorted a story about DeSantis in Florida and using a local supermarket chain for COVID vaccines. There was no reason for 60 Minutes to fictionalize the DeSantis interview except to deliberately be a hit piece against a potential Republican threat.
I found it chilling but sadly I wasn't surprised. After all, we live in a time when the once impeccable NYT now openly admits it passes off opinion as facts in its articles and deems it acceptable because somehow it's... for the greater good? Are we heading for a time where otherwise intelligent media figures not only censor but deliberately make up news specifically to attack threats to what they deem as the good society? It's the same mindset that allowed the repressive totalitarian regimes to function. But it's also a distinctly non-liberal mindset. Does it imply that the American establishment no longer truly believes in liberal democracy? If so, then Houston, we have a problem.
I'm not sure how this is all going to play out. Americans aren't ignorant. Too many people know what is going on.
"the increasing deliberate manipulation and distortion of new stories by the mainstream press"
Yes, that's gotten completely out of hand. It's blatant and unceasing. I'd argue it's the worse side of the two-sided coin. But, like you said, it's the same coin.
Once upon a time, that practice was fought by editorial departments. Separation of church and state, it was called. It made the job of advertising departments harder, and it wasn't a perfect system, but it at least recognized that editorial reputation was important.
Corporations working in concert with government to quash voices they deem undesirable is merely Fascism 2.0.
Thus far, the tactics lack the sweep and draconian authoritarianism of authentic Fascism. An actual Fascist government wouldn't just shut down a website; they'd punish the hosts and their backers, and maybe even their audience, using surveillance and detention tactics associated with martial law.
But the alliance of top-down authority in the public and private sectors to pursue the goal of censorship is uncomfortably reminiscent.
The rest of the world looks at us as “the new banana republic”. Our old President is silenced and our new government is an armed camp with twelve foot barriers, razor wire, and armed guards.
Yes, what is going on with the armed encampment in our Capitol is unnerving.
It doesn't really feel like an apples to apples comparison. Right leaning sources are much more likely to be targeted, while leftist leaning sources suffer more from collateral damage. In an age where support for individual rights is viewed as a right wing belief, it will be harder to see the occasional de-platforming of a self proclaimed left leaning person as an actual attack on the left. Traditional liberals simply are no longer left of center.
That might depend on where you are getting your stuff from - if you don’t follow “leftist” stuff you won’t notice when it is throttled. And it doesn’t matter which side you are on, question the military, war, imperialism or Israel (and they don’t have to all be connected) and you’ve got some problems coming.
Matt's still about complete leftist BLM stooge, save this one issue.
And you, Radrave, are still a massive douche with your only goal here is to distract from the topic, not add to it.
I've asked for a refund many, many times, but Matt and Substack won't respond. I'm really just drawing attention to what a fraud Taibbi is.
I'll pay your refund to leave, on the condition you never make another post.
(Oh, and it would be all in pennies)
mcelroyj on Apr 6 @~9 PM PCT
This slanderous t---l joined this site on June 21st 2020, so his particular sulfuric stink may be around for the next 2 1/2 months or so. Even more disappointing, there are actually others herein that up-click his denigrations and petty name-calling. OH NO! Did I just call him a petty name? Oops, I almost called him a troll.
As Usual,
EA
I watched some poor schmuck at work have the vending machine give him $4 in change in nickels today.
That's a suspiciously anti-semitic comment, isn't it?
Using a Yiddish aphorism is anti-Semitic?
Thank you Radrave -- you have fully unmasked yourself for a conservative ignorant shit that you are
A+
You'd think you have better things to do than respond to my comments, then.
Matt, if you are gauging by feedback from Twitter, I want to point out something.
Non-woke, non-left-leaning people join Twitter. They make polite-enough posts, get replies/likes/retweets, have fun, yay yay, etc. Then one day, with no announcement or explanation whatsoever, they'll find they are not getting feedback. They probably never even know why: they've been shadowbanned. Lack of feedback -- i.e., fun -- causes them to stop using or cut back on Twitter.
The end result is a Darwinian survival of the fittest, with Twitter having decided that woke is what's fit.
Twitter is a redux of junior high school cafeteria. The greater question should be, why does anyone give the tiniest little shit about that? If Twitter is truly a source of "news" to anyone, that person is pretty much beyond all redemption as a citizen. That Trump was once the colossus of Twitterdom ought to tell everyone all they need to know.
All anyone needs to do is READ comments in Twatter and they'll see it's full of illegible, incoherent and poorly educated dumbasses yapping a lot about NOTHING.
Utterly useless to anyone NOT trying to plug some product.
It seems strange to me that anyone really has anything left to say on the subject. I would suggest (and have with each new article you offer) that censorship is, in any way, by anyone, for any reason, wrong. Period.
It is an unassailable tenet in a free and open society, that stifling speech will result in the demise of that society. Critical thought will wilt. Truth will never see the light of day. And we will all be the less for it.
And spare me the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" knee-jerk. It doesn't now, nor will it ever hold water outside the mind of the feeble who believe it to be a legitimate exception.
I have something left to ask on the subject. How much tech censorship is driven by commercial (and thus in my view, legitimate) interests versus the personal interests of random censors or top down execucrats? I actually don't have a clear understanding of that. How much censorship is Youtube deciding that hosting oddball conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook shooting might actually be worse for selling advertisements than hosting porn? A huge part of me wants to believe it is a significant part, but the evidence keeps piling up that it isn't true. You simply can't spin the decision to block Trump from Twitter or censor the Hunter Biden story as a commercial decision. It's fundamentally anti-commercial. The ham-handed censorship of different takes on the seriousness of covid seemed like neither a commercial nor partisan decision but like evidence of an inability of censors to distinguish informed and uninformed opinion - thus demonstrating exactly why they shouldn't do it. My twitter account was suspended for re-tweeting an Aaron Mate tweet - that wasn't deleted by Twitter - pointing out that Reality Winner, regardless your opinion of how she was treated, was a trumpet-blower, not a whistleblower. I mean, I literally have no twitter followers and use the site almost exclusively as a reader. If I can attract the censors on that site, this national conversation is way, way more managed than the public realizes.
It's a great question. Are we dealing with 1. Orwell's "1984," 2. Bradbary's "Fahrenheit 451" Or 3. William Harrison "Rollerball" (1975 version with James Cann highly underrated movie).
It's obviously all three, but I think it's often a case of a shared interest for different reasons while they pretend to support the same cause. I will give you one example of many.
For the past 20 years we have been going through a moral panic around sex work relabeled as sex trafficking (See the deeply racist "White Slavery" panic from the early 1900's that is a carbon copy of what we are experiencing now).
This all started in the late 1990's after the VAWA was passed and the left and right came together to criminalize all sex work. Over the next 20 years they formed countless NGO's Like Demand Abolition, Shared Hope and The Polaris project, sometimes run by crony philanthropists like Cindy McCain and Swanney Hunt who found it an easy way to get a free government buck and poitical influence by stirring the pot and feeding largely suburban insecurities that every white van in America and interracial couple with a kid was really another young girl being kidnapped and sold into sex slavery.
Fast forward to the early 2010's and local police, politicians and prosecutors, realizing the glory days of the drug war were coming to an end with Eric Holder removing most of the Federal funding to local police to incentivize them to treat every loose joint like a major drug trafficker, the sex traffic moral panic thing seemed like a great replacement as federal funding through things like the VAWA grant shifted in that direction. The last 30 years had made them pro's at stirring up middle class anxieties with stories of "super-predators" so they barely needed to change their tactics, posters or messaging. They simply turned drug trafficking into sex trafficking.
Opportunistic AGs from around the country (AGs are always a great stepping stone to higher office) found this to be an excellent political opportunity with everyone from Elliot Spitzer in New York (that one didn't turn out very well) to AG Josh Hawley to AG Kamala Harris to Gavin Newsome and hundreds more local politicians from around the country pinning their political star on taking down some small time massage parlor in the area, than pretending with the media that they just took down a major international trafficking ring. It was all too easy and the media was anxious to play along for the click bait that both appealed to fear and sex, too all time winners. That they were mostly destroying the lives of middle aged foreign Asian women trying to pay their bills didn't much bother than and ICE was always handy to take the women away before they could be asked if what they were doing was really involuntary, which is the actual definition of sex trafficking.
The media, already floundering with big tech eating their advertising revenue lunch learned quickly that sex trafficking stories made great click bait and low quality journos like Nick Kristoff over at the NYT got clicks for endless, brealthless stories about young girls (mostly Asian) lured into a life of sexual depravity were more than once he was duped by a rent seeking NGO claiming to be a sex traffic victim to make a quick buck:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nicholas-kristof-somaly-mam_n_5479576
Like most journos in that space, ethical violations and major blunders caused little dount about his white savior narrative. Last I checked he was working with religious fundamentalists groups like Exodos Cry to take down Pornhub as a "major trafficking organization." By that he means getting payment processors to steal money from from middle ages Mom's doing porn to feed their kids and pay their rent. Going after payment processors. Sound familiar? This was pioneered by Sheriff Dart up in Cook County who in 2014 collaborated with NGO's do deny payments services to sex workers to use ad site Backpage.
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/backpage-visa-mastercard-tom-dart/
All the tools now being used to censor "Fake News" on the internet were perfected against sex workers over the past 10 years and no one cared about the 1st amendment because it was all redefined as sex trafficking.
Back to our story, big media realized the public will accept censorship if it's sold to them along with the "save the children from sex trafficking!" panic. All over the country, local cops took down local sex work boards and started throwing people in jail for running these small community boards whether they did it for free or not. It's a clear violation of the first amendment, but no one cares because it's "only sex workers" and we are stopping sex traffickers!
https://fee.org/articles/what-is-section-230-and-why-do-trump-and-his-allies-want-to-repeal-it/
Big media soon sees this moral panic as way to go after section 230 and re-establish big media as a walled garden by attacking Facebooks, Twitter and Google for "promoting sex trafficking online"
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200204/10290543852/plot-against-section-230-is-being-run-big-legacy-companies-who-failed-to-adapt-to-internet.shtml
The Plot Against Section 230 Is Being Run By Big Legacy Companies Who Failed To Adapt To The Internet
Big tech takes a look at this push to repeal section 230 to "save the children" and realizes it will become impossible expensive for small start ups to compete if they law requires them to hire all the moderators and attorney's necessary to "fight sex trafficking" once section 230 is repealed. For them it becomes and easy way to close the door on the next Facebook or Twitter behind them by raising the cost to entry with new moderation requirements.
DCRM companies from Disney to Sony soon realize that repealing section 230 will allow them to regain control over profits the open internet has cost them but shutting down platforms where people can get content without paying them a royalty for it. The start pouring money into the presidential bid of Kamala Harris, who already made it this far by shutting down Backpage and pushing FOSTA/SESTA as a way to fight online sex trafficking because they know she is their girl. Do bad she has literally no personality.
And there you have it. An example of how all three models worked at shared purpose for different reasons to take down "fake news" originally branded as "stopping sex trafficking."
The FBI, who actually got it's start fighting "the white slave panic" of the last century now has not only their replacement for the drug war that is ending, but so much work that even Homeland Security and and Customs can get in on this extremely high asset forfeiture (since it's illegal most transactions are done in cash) work as well.
I realize that was very long, but I hope it shows how once you scare the pubic with a moral panic everyone profits
heh...Rollerball - that was a classic!!
seems there was a sad and pathetic attempt at a remake a few years back.
Lazy-assed Hollywood. If they want to socially engineer us, they ought to at least stop remaking the classics and come up with some original material. God know's they're paid enough and praised enough (even if it's self-congratulatory) to do it right, not do it over.
"seems there was a sad and pathetic attempt at a remake a few years back"
The ROLLERBALL remake came out in 2002. 19 years ago -- 27 years after the 1975 original. We're due for another one in a few years.
My god I wish there was some way to edit posts in Substack. Apologize for the multiple typos.
C'mon, I loved "scare the pubic with a moral panic." It's not all bad.
Can I keep the Freudian slips?
Regulatory capture-now with happy endings!
Well that statement seems like a shot in the dark.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Thanks for all that. Fascinating read.
It's hard to get a sense of proportion, but if you want an example of conspiracy, look no further than Alex Jones. He was unpersoned by every major social media site within DAYS of each sites. People say it was just follow the leader, but... come on. Organizations of that size don't make those kinds of decisions that fast. If it wasn't a coordinated attack to get rid of somebody they didn't like, I'll eat my hat.
Thankfully, it was ineffectual. Alex Jones has as much of an audience as he ever did. (Speaking as a former fan who has been catching his act for around the past 20 years, I now despise the man. His exploitation of Sandy Hook was the last straw.)
My big worry is that there will be a continued push to use methods that DO work to ban people successfully, or to effectively reduce access to their sites.
It's not commercially driven. It doesn't cost fb, twitter, google, et. al, a penny to allow a post to remain up or an account to remain active. In fact, it's just the opposite. The actually generate MORE revenue.
As for the screeching harpies who can't stand opposing points of view and seek to banish and cancel those points of view, one has to wonder whatever happened to "changing the channel"...it was certainly their mantra when the notion of censorship raised its lethal head on the subject of television violence, language, and sexuality.
Sauce for the goose?
This is not entirely accurate. If youtube was predominantly videos of nazis and porn, it would not be able to sell advertisements on the site. There is no commercial cost to not deleting a video, a comment or a tweet, but if the site becomes a turn-off to mainstream users, there is a cost to that, and even if it doesn't, some advertisers won't want their products advertised on it.
Of course you're mistaken.
Firstly, youtube is not a predominantly nazi and porn video site - never has been, never will be. Such extremist examples do little to nothing to advance the discussion. If the earth were to smash into the sun in 10 seconds, we would all die. But it's not going to, so refraining from such nonsensical "arguments" would serve your interests better than absurd hypotheticals.
Secondly, there is an opportunity cost in deleting videos, tweets, posts, etc. Their elimination eliminates the corresponding ads that are served up with them, so there is in fact a very real cost in censorship.
As for turning off mainstream users and advertisers, it's never wise to underestimate the depths of poor taste that make fortunes. Ever heard of Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, SNL, or Hustler magazine?
Perhaps instead of seeking to dance mythical angels on the head of a hypothetical pin, you ought educate yourself a bit more on the subject of media, advertising, and appealing to the lowest common denominator - something the democratic party has been doing for decades now.
“No one has ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public”-P.T. Barnum
YouTube is so massive I really doubt they would feel much of a financial pinch from whacking Alex Jones or Dennis Prager.
People will watch anything-Yesterday I saw a profile of a teenager who has made a million dollars off Instagram, and she said her number one video was her boyfriend peeling an avocado in a weird way.
I actually didn't know that Prager videos were deleted. See that's just clearly a non-commercial decision right there. While I can understand why general circulation advertisers don't want their ads appearing on a video where Alex Jones makes some scurrilous claim that offends millions, something like Prager just doesn't have the same type of issue. It's not general circulation material like cat videos, but it's indistinguishable from most non-dramatic ideological content.
I'm afraid Dennis seems a little confused about the definition of censorship, but it does once again raises thorny issue about private groups like Twitter, Google and monetization.
https://reason.com/2019/07/30/prageru-does-not-understand-censorship/
"PragerU, the prolifically popular creator of conservative video content run by radio host Dennis Prager, claims that it is being censored by big tech. The organization took to Twitter to announce that the platform had banned it from running ads.
We've been completely banned from advertising on @Twitter.
If that isn't the censorship of conservative speech, what is? https://t.co/ys8vomp89g
— PragerU (@prageru) July 27, 2019
Except that's not actually censorship. Far from it: A quick glance at the company's Twitter feed shows that it uses the platform to great advantage, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a bevy of tweets that drive mega-engagement. If PragerU was actually "censored" by Twitter, they would not have a Twitter platform at all.
The nonprofit, which is also prohibited from advertising on Spotify, has argued that such bans violate their right to free speech. But Twitter's advertising policies have nothing to do with the First Amendment, which protects PragerU from government action—not from the decisions of a private company."
Because it’s an algorithm
Go post the same comment cut and paste numerous places as fast as you can.
The algorithm sez you are a bot.
Use attention earning buzz words - you get points until your account is flagged.
Put that your account is a parody acct and it will buy you a week or so until some kid at Twitter sends you a message that says, “Hey! You aren’t making fun of Trump supporters.”
Hahahahaha
The problem with this particular apologist reasoning, is that it doesn't cost these social media titans anything to allow posts and keep accounts open. That's not how the internet and bandwidth work. In fact, it's the reverse. They actually generate MORE revenue / profit by allowing the lengthy fights and mudslinging and trolling.
attempting to lessen the toxicity of censorship by excusing it for profit is apologism at its most rank (imo).
You are correct however, on the issue of multiple masks (more accurate I think than agenda). The First Amendment was supposed to make pivoting with the winds and whims of tyrants unnecessary. Sadly, the cowards in both new and old media have long since surrendered the mantles of vanguard and the 4th Estate in favor of bigger yachts, planes, and private islands. They're under the misguided impression that one can compensate for a small dick with a big wallet and have forgotten that kings and dictators throughout history frequently confiscate wealth from the wealthy while pimping their wives in the state's brothels...
I think one of the reasons we need to keep addressing the issue is because we don't yet have the constitutional and legal framework to preserve free speech against censorship by private actors. I'm not sure we'll get these questions resolved for a while either.
Clarence Thomas just wrote an interesting opinion related to denial of cert in a case involving section 230. He made clear that he believes the court is going to have to address 230 in an appropriate case, and the question of private censorship by the huge social media platforms. He mused whether they should be treated like the phone company as a common carrier, and thus be prohibited from censoring. But really his point was SCOTUS is going to have to deal with this. Whether other justices will agree, who knows. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/clarence-thomas-blasts-section-230-wants-common-carrier-rules-on-twitter/
We Don't have the Constitutional Frame work : the first amendment will not suffice ?
Love the handle.
Not knowing at the time how fascism would work (the state collaborating with business to create a police state) the founders never imagined the State would simply work with private companies to circumvent The Constitution (3rd party doctrine with the 4th amendment, tech companies with the first). There are no protections in place for this.
To be honest, we often don't honor the 1st amendment even when the government encroaches directly on the 1st amendment. From hate crimes, to ads for illegal activities, to crime narrative being charged as a felony, the days of the Brandenburg vs Ohio "imminent lawless action" test is dead at the State and Appeals level for over a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
State and Appeals decision are full of "fire in a crowded building" language to punish language the state does not approve of, whether it actually promotes imminent violence or not.
That one only works if your case makes it to the Supreme's, and it almost certainly will not.
Apparently not - the Courts are taking over where the Legislatures give up.
I stand corrected. You are of course, right. The Thomas statement is spot on. My contention however still stands that censorship is unacceptable - public or private - and the fools who think they can make billions and still censor at will are ignorant of history and what tyrants do (tyrants on the left or the right) to wealthy idiots with too much money and power.
Isn't there some warning about being careful who you step on while climbing the ladder? The hubris coming out of Silicon Valley may cost a head or two to roll - literally.
Manipulating partisan emotions is the best route to inject propaganda.
Trump has been the greatest gift in this regard: I can imagine no faster way to turn so-called liberals into CIA/FBI worshiping advocates for censorship. He's like a sheepdog that has herded fearful Democrats into the abbatoir.
Hardly, the effort to control the press was in full swing before Trump became president. Witness the 2016 Journolist group of journalists coordinating their stories to get maximum political advantage for Hillary Clinton.
Even earlier, there are Ben Rhodes shocking disclosure of how journalists he controlled were used to steer discussion of the Iran nuclear deal in a positive direction and eclipsing coverage of any negative aspects.
I don't dispute that. I simply suggested that Trump, ironically, accelerated the move toward authoritarianism among self-described liberals.
Enemies strengthen collective bonds. Sometimes for good reason, but usually it just seems to be for manipulation
Another oldie:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/07/how-to-spot-a-twitter-troll/
"It is a matter of simple fact that the British government employs a very large number of people whose full time job is to influence the political narrative on social media. The 77th Brigade of the British Army, the Integrity Initiative, MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ all run major programmes of covert online propaganda. These information warriors operate on twitter, facebook, and in comments sections across the internet.
"I have long been fascinated by the disconnect by which people, who do know and understand that the security services employ tens of thousands of people and have budgets of billions, nevertheless find it hard to accept that they may come personally into contact with their operations. Therefore when I state that the security services infiltrate groups including environmentalists and the SNP, and were involved in the Skripal story in ways not public, there is a peculiar desire among people to reject it as it is uncomfortable. Equally while people do know the security services are committing huge sums to social media influencing, to point out any of its instances brings derisive shouts of “conspiracy theory”."
Is anyone naive enough to believe the US government doesn't do the exact same thing?
Could you-or any interested party-figure out who the plant is on here or the MAGA4EVER Facebook group or 4chan or Silk Road 2.0 or wherever else the feds want to snoop?
All governments, all the time. Oddly, we fixate on "Russian interference" while ignoring British, French, Turkish, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Canadian, Mexican, Brazilian, ......
I think there’s a big logistical difference between surveillance and active participation.
I can believe active participation is happening against foreign adversaries (but probably not effectively). I’m skeptical it can happen domestically in any systematic way given the laws and risk aversion of bureaucrats. Domestic surveillance is another story.
I'm of the opinion that everything that intelligence does, whether known foreign or postulated domestic, impacts America.
Adam Curtis tells a story about Reagan. Evidently Reagan had read a book that said that all terrorism in the world was ultimately funded by Moscow. He approached Casey and told him to investigate the claims. Casey gave the book to his analysts for investigation. They quickly returned the book to Casey, telling him the book was useless because all the sources were black propaganda that the US created for inclusion in foreign media.
Casey chose to ignore them, instead finding a friendly academic to write the policy paper which greatly aided Reagan in ramping up the Cold War.
As far as your skepticism goes, I hope your right.
My point, I suppose, was more what if. What if cancel culture and all social media censorship hysteria is an entirely manipulated psychological operation designed to make left wingers embrace censorship under the guise of "social justice" while isolating an already paranoid right wing, thereby ensuring there will be no meaningful pushback by a unified populace, only an easily managed division and distrust?
If it is,it’s going a hell of a lot more smoothly and effectively than CIA psy-ops from the 50s and 60s!!!!!!
I think your last paragraph might be the biggest piece of the pie. Intelligence agencies have been, to some degree more or less, but certainly TOO MUCH, pulling the strings of the country and the world for many, many decades. I think more people need to start considering that the intelligence agencies are running the show - some politicians and oligarchs are in on it while others are just pawns who believe what their minds are trained to believe.
I think a detached assessment will lead to seeing that both the Blues and the Reds were primed to flair up after the election whichever way the outcome went.
I think you need to spend some time with beltway IC bureaucrats and ask yourself if those kinds of people have the wherewithal to carry out the kind of plan you’re describing.
Probably just paranoid. I'll pass on the whole "spending time with beltway bureaucrats" plan. Thanks anyway.
Of course that doesn't rule out the scenario where the beltway bureaucrats just aren't in the loop.
It is always Occam's razor and monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare.
NSA?
Good at surveillance. Less so on anything operational. Especially domestically.
I misread your post as suggesting there wasn’t much surveillance domestically and thus put “NSA.” But I do think people are vastly underestimating the intelligence agencies.
I don’t see why anyone would assume the agencies become manifestly less competent just because they are within US borders. But even the operations that take place overseas are also controlling minds within the US to generate support. The problem is, of course we only find out when something goes wrong and the cover is blown or maybe when papers are declassified half a century later and nobody cares or what was done is considered acceptable to the present.
Only the most indoctrinated Nazis.
Anyone catch the blatant PBS / 60 Minutes smear against DeSantis regarding the vaccine rollout in Florida? Maybe Matt should interview the producers or the woman reporter who led the charge.
60 Minutes used to be my favorite TV moment. I don’t even watch it now. It’s agenda has smothered its truth.
Yeah, I remember looking forward to it way back when, but I gave up TV altogether about 15 years ago. Is Frontline still good?
No. They have some weird alien thing hosting it named "Lester Holt" and it's just creepy now.
Yes, they still keep it real for the most part. The last thing I saw on Frontline was an expose of a sterilization program on female prison inmates-they asked them for consent when they were doped up for other surgeries/procedures.
Used to be good, but I haven’t watched it for a while.
Publix=100k donation to DeSantis HORRORS
Silicon Valley=23 million donation to Gavin Newsome Crickets........
Meanwhile Gov. Newsom is dining out with friends in fancy restaurants wondering why people are fleeing CA in droves. Gee, when you politicize even viruses..
That's a feature not a bug for the left; since fleeing Californians are mostly wealthy SJW parasite types who flee California but then immediately begin turning the states they flee (see Colorado, Georgia, and Texas) to into the same pozzed hellscapes California was turned into without bothering to give a fuck to look inwards and see that they are the reason California became "unlivable".
No wanton exaggeration here!
Hahahaha. Walks into a Brownsville Home Depot for the first time after relocating and looks around.
“Why aren’t you people wearing masks!”
Plenty of cities and towns in California where you'd see the same sort of proud anti-mask stuff. It's just not the places most people associate with California (read: LA or SF). I find it incredibly tiring to read people who think they understand our state and likely have spent little if any time here.
Do Bay Area or LA denizens understand the Central Valley or up I-5 through Redding or Yreka(not actually on I-5, I know)
Oh. Well my comment wasn’t about your state.
It was about tourist residents who upon arrival, immediately embarrass themselves by trying to control the natives.
Rock on California. Que hora es un celebracion?
You do realize that Brownsville is about 98% Hispanic? Not exactly a hotbed of good ole boys
- former resident
Hahahahaha no, I didn’t I just picked a Texas town which is not my own.
In my experience few Hispanics wear masks but I am not exactly rubbing shoulders with high brows.
Why should viruses be allowed to escape politicization? If you make that exception, you open the door for other things to follow - possibly even people. Nothing must be allowed to escape being politicized!
But.. but... MUH SCIENCE!!!! Muh beloved science!
It used to be free from the taint of stinky humanity because it was either provable or it wasn't.
Now?
Pff. Ask Gov. Newsom about how the term "science" is used as a cudgel.
Science once meant freeing the mind from it's ingrained prejudices; now SCIENCE! is an authority, an oracle - the pronouncements of which must be received with reverence and awe. It might just as well have the stone head from Zardoz as the logo/mascot.
I'm afraid science has always faced this frailty of humanity:
The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/friedrich-nietzsche-the-gay-science.pdf
Some have taken to referring to it as a plandemic.
That's the first I've heard of it and unsurprisingly, all a google search comes up with is an endless list of debunk articles and videos.
It's not that I'd necessarily subscribe to such thinking, but I'd rather see it for myself than ONLY see what others think of it.
That's not an option here though.
Do I think COVID was "planned"? No.
Was it politicized and used as a cudgel to beat the masses into submission through economic hardship? Yes. Absolutely I think so.
Impeachment didn't work, the Russiagate narrative fell through without a peep and the economy was booming. All of it was backfiring on the establishment and NEWS FLASH! There's a deadly virus that requires lockdowns, absent voting and late vote counting and absolute controls over the workforce and their right to assemble.
Couple that with speech restriction, political morality policing and walling in the US capital as a fortress of solitude for Breznhev Biden and we have the raw ingredients simmering in a giant pot of smackdown.
Feels bad man.
We'll see, maybe. Since the exact origin of the virus is shrouded in mystery and propaganda, it's not possible at this time to say whether it was planned from the get go or not, or simply seen as a golden opportunity to implement authoritarian policies in the west. But the continued insistence on CCP lockdowns and masking despite mounting evidence these policies do more harm than good combined with the main beneficiaries of these policies being Big Pharma and Corps like Amazon/Walmart, not to mention the Chinese economy, indicate that there is a plan now that has little to do with public health. Bio-ID was brought up years ago, by Uncle Bill and Aunt Melinda, and this seems to be the end game now.
Scott - don't waste time with Radrave troll
Boris is a good little puppy. Give him a pat on the head.
Re: radrave on Apr 6 @~6 PMpct
From the reading of many of your repetitive ill-informed narrative talking-points, it appears that "Boris", and numerous others have arrived at a similar conclusion, in that you seem to strive and live for the insignificance of vapid nonsense. May I be the first to congratulate you for achieving your status as a resident troll; you are not alone, simply one of the more obvious grantees of this distinction.
Stay safe, and try not to empathize with the
families and friends of the 500,000,000 plus of our fellow citizens who have fallen pray to this deadly malady, and besides, being a fool is more fun.....or IS IT?
As Usual,
EA
Here's an article from the UK -- where the situation is much worse.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/why-we-need-a-covid-nuremberg-trial/
"Questions would necessarily be asked about decisions to remove elderly ‘bed-blockers’ from NHS facilities into private ‘care homes’, about who issued clinical instructions not to use cheap and proven treatments, such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and who decided to force experimental and unproven medical treatments on to the entire population and to deny liberty and freedom to those who resist."
Typical MSM fake news
Basically now we have all the legacy/corporate/propaganda media lying and censoring 100% of the time, and most of the independent journalists devoting 95% of their time to watching the lying legacy/corporate/propaganda media lie and censor, and then writing about what they see there.
Meanwhile 99% of the population outside the political/media circles knows that 100% of the legacy media is lying all the time, is interested in true, timely reporting about real economic and social issues, and can't find it anywhere.
SAD.
This is a great article. As always Taibbi is an excellent journalist and writer and brings up important issues. Thank you for existing.