The Censorship-Industrial Complex

Mark Scott recently wrote about this at Politico and said the “Censorship Industrial Complex is an insidious effort by (mostly American) government agencies, social media giants and a litany of outside groups to silence online voices, corral public opinion and promote an authoritarian view of the world where people’s liberties come second to societal groupthink.” Social media companies are instituting new rules allegedly to protect against Russian election interference and hurting people’s feelings. Europeans in particular are telling tech companies they will be shut out of Europe completely or have to pay bankrupting billions in fines if they don’t comply with new rules. One commission’s “officials told Meta, Alphabet and TikTok, separately, that they needed to invest more resources (particularly local language experts) to quell the rise of Russian propaganda and LGBTQ+ hate speech.”

But in reality, as Matt Tabibi warns, the rules aim to prevent alternative points of view from gaining attention: “The larger, scarier issue is the construction of this gigantic internet system that is designed to get people to preempt dangerous thoughts by getting people to avoid having them in the first place.”

Government and social media companies and internet providers and content providers have an apparent agreement to work together as a tech-tatorship, only allowing the propaganda of the official narrative through – which tends to cause divisions between groups of people, silence dissent, promote victimhood and woke ideology, and support only leftist/socialist/communist/globalist ideology. “You will eat bugs and own nothing and be happy.”

Brick by digital brick, the walls are being built to restrain and enclose free speech as if it were the radioactive core of the Chernobyl disaster – which is about how TPTB feel about free speech, or any other freedoms. How dare you question their authority and decisions!?! A bill to ban Tik Tok in the United States is being considered right now – at least, that’s how it’s being presented. Tik Tok is an insidious Chinese platform designed to turn America’s dopamine fiend youth into incompetent zombies with short attention spans and no capability to solve problems or think critically or have useful roles in a productive society. The videos Tik Tok plays for Chinese children is far more heavily focused on teaching them math and science. But the bill under review is not really about harmful content on Tik Tok.

Tik Tok has become an online shopping platform and a direct competitor of Amazon and Facebook, two of the top ten big spenders lobbying in Washington D.C. As the crew at “Toilet Time” explains:

And though rarely mentioned, the bill’s more important aspects also include rules against hiding one’s online location and identity with a VPN. Because reporters like Julian Assange or Gonzalo Lira or James O’Keefe – or any other investigator – need to be able to contact whistleblowers and other sources anonymously sometimes. And government doesn’t want anything happening anonymously. So in the interest of preventing Chinese or Russian or terrorist activity online, another freedom is being removed without most of the public knowing what the bill is really about.

A more recent article by Jeffrey Tucker – The Grinch Who Stole Freedom – at The Epoch Times warns:

“We have a few historical examples of presidents criticizing the court but none to their faces in a State of the Union address. This comes two weeks after President Biden directly bragged about defying the Supreme Court over the issue of student loan forgiveness. The court said he could not do this on his own, but President Biden did it anyway.

Here we have an issue of civic decorum that you cannot legislate or legally codify. Essentially, under the U.S. system, the president has to agree to defer to the highest court in its rulings even if he doesn’t like them. President Biden is now aggressively defying the court and adding direct threats on top of that. In other words, this president is plunging us straight into lawlessness and dictatorship.

In the background here, you must understand, is the most important free speech case in U.S. history. The Supreme Court on March 18 will hear arguments over an injunction against President Biden’s administrative agencies as issued by the Fifth Circuit. The injunction would forbid government agencies from imposing themselves on media and social media companies to curate content and censor contrary opinions, either directly or indirectly through so-called “switchboarding.”

A ruling for the plaintiffs in the case would force the dismantling of a growing and massive industry that has come to be called the censorship-industrial complex. It involves dozens or even more than 100 government agencies, including quasi-intelligence agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which was set up only in 2018 but managed information flow, labor force designations, and absentee voting during the COVID-19 response.

A good ruling here will protect free speech or at least intend to. But, of course, the Biden administration could directly defy it. That seems to be where this administration is headed. It’s extremely dangerous.

A ruling for the defense and against the injunction would be a catastrophe. It would invite every government agency to exercise direct control over all media and social media in the country, effectively abolishing the First Amendment.

Close watchers of the court have no clear idea of how this will turn out. But watching President Biden glare at court members at the address, one does wonder. Did they sense the threats he was making against them? Will they stand up for the independence of the judicial branch?

Maybe his intimidation tactics will end up backfiring. After all, does the Supreme Court really think it is wise to license this administration with the power to control all information flows in the United States?

The deeper issue here is a pressing battle that is roiling American life today. It concerns the future and power of the administrative state versus the elected one. The Constitution contains no reference to a fourth branch of government, but that is what has been allowed to form and entrench itself, in complete violation of the Founders’ intentions. Only the Supreme Court can stop it, if they are brave enough to take it on.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, and surely you have, President Biden is nothing but a marionette of deep-state interests. He is there to pretend to be the people’s representative, but everything that he does is about entrenching the fourth branch of government, the permanent bureaucracy that goes on its merry way without any real civilian oversight.”