Over the past three months, a small
group of independent journalists, including Michael Shellenberger and
Matt Taibbi, have sifted through Elon Musk's Twitter Files, exposing the
many ways in which social media platforms have censored Americans at
the behest of the U.S. government, and spread fabricated propaganda
intended to "debunk" truthful stories.
March 9, 2023, Shellenberger and Taibbi testified before Congress,
explaining how "a highly organized network of U.S. government agencies
and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring
social media companies to censor Americans."1 To say that their findings are shocking would be an understatement.
As it turns out, a long list of government agencies has special
departments or teams whose duty it is to manage public censorship, in
direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, which they swore an oath to
uphold. In short, there's a secret "censorship-industrial complex" in
the U.S., to use Shellenberger's term, and they are actively engaged in
all-out information warfare against the American public.
Shellenberger and Taibbi are now calling on Congress to defund and
dismantle this censorship-industrial complex in its entirety, and to do
so immediately. We cannot afford to let this treasonous cancer to grow
any further. If we do not put a permanent end to it now, we will lose
this republic and all the freedoms we've enjoyed under it.
Shellenberger's Testimony to Congress
Shellenberger's testimony before Congress is 68 pages long, so I cannot review all the details here. You can download and/or read it on his Substack.2 Here's an excerpt from his opening remarks:
"The Twitter Files,
state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have
revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic
institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively
censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range
of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails
relating to Hunter Biden's business dealings, climate change, renewable
energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues …
'If government officials are directing or
facilitating such censorship,' notes George Washington University law
professor Jonathan Turley, 'it raises serious First Amendment questions.
It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is
prohibited from doing directly.'
Moreover, we know that the U.S. government has funded
organizations that pressure advertisers to boycott news media
organizations and social media platforms that a) refuse to censor and/or
b) spread disinformation, including alleged conspiracy theories.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of
Washington, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and
Graphika all have inadequately disclosed ties to the Department of
Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with
multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship
research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think
tanks.
It is important to understand how these groups
function … they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then
pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor,
deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists …
These organizations and others are also running their
own influence operations, often under the guise of 'fact-checking' … In
many instances, censorship, such as labeling social media posts, is
part of the influence operation aimed at discrediting factual
information …
Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade
government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from
'countering terrorism' to 'countering extremism' to countering simple
misinformation.
The government no longer needs a predicate of calling
you a terrorist or extremist to deploy government resources to counter
your political activity. The only predicate it needs is simply the
assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong."
Disinformation Superspreaders
Shallenberger's full testimony reviews the roles of key organizations
and individuals within the government's censorship network and provides
specific examples disinformation campaigns created and propagated by
this network, including the Trump-Russian collusion conspiracy theory,
the delegitimization of the COVID lab leak theory, and the Hunter Biden
laptop conspiracy theory.
In the case of the Hunter Biden laptop, the FBI initiated the plot to
quench the story. In collaboration with Twitter, Facebook and the Aspen
Institute, the FBI held a tabletop exercise to practice the shaping of
the media's coverage of a potential "hack and dump" operation involving
Hunter Biden material,3,4 several weeks before the New York Post broke the story (which was subsequently censored everywhere).
Shallenberger also details how Renee DiResta,
who is part of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — the
nongovernmental side of the censorship network — helped derail
Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore's campaign in 2017 by launching
thousands of fake bots against him on Facebook and Twitter.5
DiResta is now a research manager and top lieutenant at the Stanford
Internet Observatory, where she's directly connected to the
Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) censorship
directorate. She's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR),6 the goal of which is to bring about a totalitarian one world government.7 DiResta's work history also includes a stint of unknown duration with the CIA.8
While CISA, which is a sub-department of the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), was originally tasked with defending the U.S. against
foreign cybersecurity threats, it quickly morphed into a government
entity focused almost solely on domestic censorship.
Chris Krebs, who oversaw CISA's transformation, was fired by
President Donald Trump in mid-November 2020. Krebs then formed the cyber
consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group together with Alex Stamos, director
of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former chief of security at
Facebook. Krebs and Stamos are also leaders at the Aspen Institute,
which was part of the FBI's exercise to train social media on how to
censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Why Democrats Demand Censorship
In a more recent Substack article,9
Shellenberger shares his thoughts on why the Democratic Party are so
supportive of and insistent on censorship. He believes it was triggered
by "two seismic challenges to the postwar liberal order of 2016: Brexit
in June and the election of Donald Trump as president in November."
"The two events shocked and frightened national
security leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Many openly said that
the political threat to NATO and the Western Alliance was bigger than
any security threat, a conclusion dramatically reinforced by the
election of Trump in 2016, who had repeatedly criticized NATO and hinted
at withdrawing the U.S. from it …
Elites spent the following six years reacting to this
blow to their control over the media discourse and, thus, their ability
to manufacture consent. In January 2017, The Department of Homeland
Security DHS quietly expanded its mission from cybersecurity to
cybercensorship by arguing that 'misinformation' is a 'cyberattack' on
US critical infrastructure.
On January 6th, 2017, in his final act as Director of
DHS, Jeh Johnson declared elections 'critical infrastructure.' The
concept of critical infrastructure went from physical things like
satellites and dams and federal buildings to events like elections or
public health campaigns."
So, the DHS basically justified censorship by placing
"misinformation" on par with a "cyberattack" on critical infrastructure,
which makes it a threat to national security. Shallenberger goes on to
review the unique role of the EIP, which consists of the Stanford
Internet Observatory, Washington University's Center for an Informed
Public, The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab and
Graphika.
The EIP and CISA entered into a formal partnership to censor election
misinformation in late June 2020, and as explained by EIP leader Stamos
himself, the purpose of the partnership was to do the censoring that
the U.S. government could not do due to lack of legal authority.
Ever since then, the EIP has acted as a bridge between government and
social media platforms, monitoring and instructing social media on what
to remove on the government's behalf.
When censorship of COVID information first became apparent, I warned
that it wouldn't stop there, and it hasn't. Denying manmade climate
change is now an offense that will get you axed, and as reported by
Shellenberger,10 CISA in June 2022 "announced that it would also demand censorship of information relating to the financial world."
Domestic Censorship Superweapons
We cannot wait until the day when merely stating the obvious — that
we're in a recession — will get you booted off social media. CISA and
all other government departments and teams engaged in censorship must be
defunded and abolished.
We must also open up a conversation about the use of artificial
intelligence and quantum technologies to improve and automate censorship
capabilities, because that's precisely what the National Science
Foundation (NSF) is doing — and this work is being funded by the U.S.
government. As reported by the Foundation for Freedom Online:11
"In the promo video below, National Science
Foundation (NSF) grant project WiseDex explains how the federal
government is funding it to provide social media platforms with 'fast,
comprehensive and consistent' censorship solutions.
WiseDex builds sprawling databases of banned keywords
and factual claims to sell to companies like Facebook, YouTube, and
Twitter. It then integrates this banned-claims databases into censorship
algorithms, so that 'harmful misinformation stops reaching big
audiences' … And the Biden Administration, via the NSF, is providing
start-up capital for tech tools to get social media platforms to censor
more aggressively."
'Course Correct' — Another Censorship Superweapon
Another NSF censorship superweapon under development is called Course Correct. According to the promo video (above), they are:
"… building the core machine learning data science
and artificial intelligence technology to identify misinformation, using
logistics, network science, and temporal behavior, so that we can very
accurately identify what misinformation, where misinformation is
spreading, who is consuming the misinformation, and what is the reach of
the misinformation …
Course Correct has pioneered experimental evidence
showing that the strategic placement of corrective information in social
media networks can reduce misinformation flow … Course Correct can tell
journalists the most effective ways to correct misinformation in the
actual networks where the misinformation is doing the most damage."
Basically, what they've discovered is that the most effective way to
shut down an undesirable counternarrative is to strike it down when it
first appears. If the first instance is deleted, then the idea can't
"gain legs."
This means that the primary "enemies of the state" are
thought-leaders, people who share ideas, positions or viewpoints that
differ from the official narrative. Without doubt, I'm already on that
list, and unless Congress takes swift action to rein in this madness,
things are only going to get more dangerous from here.
And, as disturbing as all of that is already, WiseDex and Course
Correct are just two of about a dozen or so censorship tools being
developed by the NSF with government funding!
Military-Grade Information Weapons Are Being Deployed
By now, it ought to be apparent that our government is at war, and
the enemy is we the people. The fact that it's an information war
doesn't make it any less serious. As reported by Foundation for Freedom
Online:12
"One of the most disturbing aspects of the [NSF's]
Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how
similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and
monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and
counterterrorism contexts abroad."
The mere fact that the government is developing and deploying
military-grade censorship and propaganda weapons at us — the very people
paying their salaries with our hard-earned tax dollars — is telling and
does absolutely nothing to instill trust.
Government Decommissions FOIA Website
Eroding public trust even more, the federal government recently
announced it will decommission FOIAonline as of September 30, 2023.13 This is the website where all Freedom of Information Act responses were made available to the public.
Now, the only way you can view the documents a government agency has
released in response to a previous FOIA request is by re-requesting them
for yourself, which can be both time-consuming and costly, or somehow
obtaining them from the original requester, if you know who they are.
Thought Police Ties to Big Pharma and DOD
As of September 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense has also paid NewsGuard $749,387 to censor and suppress conservative media,14 a fact that again highlights the military nature of all this censorship.
NewsGuard,
which claims to rate news websites for reliability, accuracy and
trustworthiness, was founded in 2018 with seed money from the Publicis Groupe,
one of the largest PR companies in the world that services several of
the largest drug companies on the planet. As noted by The Gateway
Pundit:15
"NewsGuard has consistently attacked The Gateway
Pundit on COVID, the Hunter Biden laptop, and vaccines that have all
been proven to be accurate. NewsGuard has NEVER criticized the
mainstream media for lying about Trump-Russia collusion, the Hunter
Biden laptop, COVID and vaccines. So why is the federal government
funding this radical censorship outfit?"
Needless to say, I've been a constant target of NewsGuard, whose
so-called "fact-checkers" can't seem to get their facts straight no
matter how many references you give them. Nor do they have the expertise
to evaluate the evidence.
Here is the latest exchange my team had with John Gregory, a "health editor" at NewsGuard.
He contacted us March 9, 2023, saying they were updating their existing
review of Mercola.com content and had questions about our editorial
practices. The exchange starts at the bottom, so you'll have to read it
from bottom-up.
Twitter Files Have Opened a Can That Cannot Be Closed
The Twitter Files have really opened a huge window into the U.S.
government's illegal censorship of American citizens, and the extent of
this censorship network is far greater than anyone previously suspected.
Is this really the government we want? Should the DOD be allowed to use
military-grade social engineering and propaganda tools against the
American public?
I, for one, second Shellenberger's statement to Congress:16
"Congress should immediately cut off funding to the
censors and investigate their activities. Second, it should mandate
instant reporting of all conversations between social media executives,
government employees, and contractors concerning content moderation.
Third, Congress should limit the broad permission given to social media
platforms to censor, deplatform, and spread propaganda."
The government censorship machine must be dismantled, now, before it's too late.