Censorship Industrial Complex
Plus the Zuckerberg files, Hunter's 'laptop from hell' and the oldest War in the West...
“Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.”
―Mark Twain
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
Always quick to act... forever slow to think... governments around the world have waged wars against all manner of non-military targets over the past half century.
Poverty... Drugs... Terrorism... Obesity...
And now, after hundreds of billions of dollars squandered on the above-mentioned quagmires – not to mention millions of lives lost along the way – you might think the hard-headed political brass would afford themselves a moment of pause, of self-reflection.
“Gee... can we really wage war against a relative economic outcome? Lay siege to real world demand? Go to battle with a tactic? Raise the flag against... being fat?
What next, the War on Stoopid?”
[Tip for the Feds: Public Enemy #1 is in the mirror!]
Having demonstrated an uncanny ability to fail on practically every front and field, these tireless combatants simply shrug off their (read: other people’s) losses and bumble blindly toward the next frontier...
The latest battle line: The War on Speech.
Yes, dear reader, don’t look now... but there’s a specter haunting The West, the specter of free expression!
A Dusty Artifact
Long ago considered a pillar of free societies – along with freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and the right to practice whatever religion one pleases, however kooky it may seem to others – free expression was even enumerated in a once-relevant document.
Students of history will recognize this dusty artifact as the Bill of Rights, which contains the first ten amendments to the American Constitution. Here’s the one concerning free speech, craftily hidden from plain view... right there at the top of the list:
Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition to Government for a redress of grievances.
On the subject of the “Free Press,” we note that even the mighty “Land of the Free” itself is not immune from The State’s chloroform-soaked glove.
Just last week, Meta Man and quintessential Bond villain, Mark Zuckerberg, revealed that federal authorities – including the FBI, CIA and other spook agencies – had directly intervened in Facebook’s editorial decisions in the weeks immediately preceding the 2020 presidential election.
In addition to leaning on the social media platform to demote certain stories surrounding Covid (stories that many at the time believed to be true... and that – shock horror! – later turned out to be just so), federal agencies also ordered Facebook to dig a shallow grave and bury The New York Post story concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Readers will recall the “laptop from hell” that then presidential candidate, Joe “The Big Guy” Biden’s son dropped off at a repair store in New Jersey. Thought to contain all manner of incriminating evidence (which – gasp! – it did), the story was nonetheless dismissed out of hand by the Censorship Industrial Complex.
That is, no sooner had the dastardly device surfaced than the feds cobbled together a goose-stepping battalion of over fifty “current and former intelligence operatives” which promptly concluded, as if on command, that the whole thing was “classic Russian disinformation.”
Turns out, it was “classic American government disinformation.”
Spy vs Spy
And yet, it wasn’t the contents of the laptop per se that were the problem here, although certainly the criminal dealings of a presidential candidate’s son, and his business connection to his father, who went on to occupy the White House and impose his own censorship directives, ought to have been troubling enough.
The real issue at hand was that members of the Deep State overtly abridged the First Amendment rights of American citizens, specifically regarding access to a free press. (See dusty document, above.)
In his letter to the House Judiciary committee, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”
So when just such a story popped up (imagine the coincidence), Facebook quashed the piece while it went through the “fact-checker” (i.e. information gatekeeper) pipeline. By the time the story turned out to be true, and Americans were “allowed” to learn all about it, the election was run and won... and the very same Biden Family was happily frolicking around the White House grounds.
Pre-Musk Twitter also suppressed the story and even went so far as to suspend The New York Post’s account, suggesting a coordinate, wide-scale censorship operation across social media networks. (Hmm… something about federal agencies pressuring media platforms to suspend the account of the oldest continually running newspaper in the US seems decidedly, uh, “un-free-press-like.”)
In his letter to congress, Zuckerberg also admitted he was “pressured” by the feds to fall in line when it came to other “sensitive” topics, this time by the Biden White House directly. Wrote Zuck:
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree...”
And so, while President Biden himself was telling Americans that “misinformation” propagated by social media platforms was, quite literally, “killing people,” it was their misinformation that was being promoted and the work of many a reputable scientist, critic and “conspiracy theorist” that was being silenced.
Doin’ Time
In the wake of these revelations, Donald Trump has suggested that Mr. Zuckerberg might spend “the rest of his life in jail.”
One wonders whether, sensing that Mr. Trump might well be on his way back to the White House, Zuckerberg is feeling impelled to be a little more forthright with sensitive information, perhaps as a way to hedge his bets ahead of the election. And if that is the case, is there something Zuck knows about Kamala Harris’s shiny, happy poll numbers (and the lying media driving the “joyous campaign” narrative)? Something the rest of us mere plebeians deplorables citizens of the world are not privy to?
We may never know, of course… and almost certainly not during this election cycle, when such information might actually be relevant.
Zuck says he’s sorry for the oversight and that it won’t happen again. Pinky promise. But how much do you really trust the unholy alliance between Big Tech and Big Censorship? They’ve been caught in bed together once...
That’s one problem with governments overriding citizens’ rights to free speech and freedom of the press: information is left in the hands of the watchers, to be revealed only how and when they see fit...which often includes not at all.
In a world where such rights become privileges, to be afforded or denied by government whim, one has to wonder... who watches the watchers?
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Good news, dear readers! From the East to the West… in Americas North and South… from one “End of the World” to another… the message of free markets, free minds and free people is taking hold.
Everywhere, people are beginning to see the mainstream media for the shameless government propagandists they are… and trust in legacy outlets is plumbing historical lows.
A national Gallup poll from 2023 found that the share of respondents who said their level of trust in the media was “none at all” reached 39%, while those who trusted the media either “a great deal/a fair amount” dipped to just 32%.
A further 29% said they trusted the media “not very much,” meaning 68% of respondents fell into the “not very much/none at all” trust in media segment.
And that was before the whole “this is the best version of Biden ever” saga, the “bloodbath” hoax and the “Joyful Kamala” campaign shenanigans.
Meanwhile, independent sources – such as these humble Notes From the End of the World – continue to reach a larger and more engaged readership than ever. Over the past year alone, our audience has grown to include subscribers in all 50 US states and 133 countries around the world.
Of course, this is only possible through the generous support of our dear Notes members, to whom we are forever grateful. If you enjoy the work we do here, and would like to join our growing community of readers championing free markets, free minds and free people, please consider becoming a member here, today. Cheers!
An aprocryphal story is that Einstein was shown a German newspaper that claimed "One hundred German physicists claim Einsteins theory of relativity is wrong." Einsteins reply was supposedly, "If I were wrong, it would only take one."
Kinda reminds you of the 51 spooks against the Hunter laptop, doesn't it?
I don't like Zuckerberg, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt concerning his "come to Jesus" moment. It's entirely possible that he has had a change of heart concerning his censorship. I'm still not going to use fakebook, though. Never liked it, either.