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Posts tagged ‘disinformation’

It’s OK to be WHITE, Maybe

By: Lawrence Johnson | March 13, 2023

homer Simpson, cancel culture, Kevin Jackson

“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson

As a society, we understand very well the term, “free speech isn’t free.” This double-entendre statement has arguably been more applicable in the past several years than in any other time in history. That all freedoms come at a cost, most understand, but the freedom to say what you believe or think, is literally under siege these days.

In such cases, due to terms like, ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ it need not even be a lie; an imagined slight is all it takes. This quote from “The Simpson’s movie” back in 2007 references an ideology that at the time, seemed far-fetched. However, as life imitates art in 2023, simply laughing at something funny or speaking unpopular truths can end a career.

During the last weekend of February 2023, the popular comic strip “Dilbert” was dropped by nearly 80 newspaper outlets across the country after what many considered a ‘racist rant’ by its creator, Scott Adams.

According to News One, “It followed an incident in which Adams, on his program “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reacted to a recent survey by Rasmussen Reports that concluded only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” If only about half thought it was OK to be white, Adams remarked, this qualified Black Americans as a “hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f— away because there is no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”

Adams later doubled down on his statements, writing on Twitter that “Dilbert has been canceled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.”

According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:

February 22: Adams spends several profanity-laden minutes telling white people to “get away” from Black people after reading a Rasmussen poll that found that only 53% of Black respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”
February 24: Some newspapers and publishing groups, including the USA TODAY Network and Advance Local Group, decide to stop publishing Dilbert, removing the cartoon from over 200 papers across the country.
February 25: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Antonio Express-News, among others, drop Dilbert.
February 25: Adams expands on his remarks in an almost two-hour interview with online personality Hotep Jesus.
February 26: Adams links to Saturday’s interview and tweets he’s only accepting criticism from people who know the full context, claiming that much of the coverage against him is “fake news.”
February 26: Elon Musk tweets support of Adams, claiming: “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.
February 26: The National Cartoonists Society disavows “all forms of racism and discrimination” (Dilbert won the Society’s highest honor, the Reuben Award, in 1998).
February 27: Adams is dropped by publishing company Andrews McMeel Universal, whose chairman and CEO tweeted that the company supports free speech but not “commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”
February 28: Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House, cancels the September release of Adams’ Reframe Your Brain, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Cancel Culture Gone Crazy

Though Adams has been derided for his outspokenness before, this was something new. In a matter of only four days, an iconic comic strip with millions of devoted readers is erased from newspapers all over America. Amazing how damaging thinking aloud can be.

Whether audiences of media, social and otherwise realize it, we are at an inflection point. While it may appear hyperbolic, unless you’ve been sleeping- we should all be concerned. One of the best things that Americans and those seeking to be citizens of this country once appreciated was our Constitution.

Within that document sits a list of Amendments, and these contained rights that bestowed freedoms on every American. Among those are rights against illegal search and seizure, the right to bear arms, and of course- the freedom of speech.

No doubt most of us have watched over time as those rights (mentioned and not mentioned) have not just eroded, but rather, simply been taken away. If the adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” tells us anything, our Constitution, as is, may have a shelf life, with a looming expiration date.

Weighing In

While this writer does not agree entirely with Scott Adams’ feelings or assessment, he has every right to say it, much like a Klansman in full-hooded garb, can, and has the right to walk into an all-black-neighborhood and yell, “I HATE NIGGERS!” from the top of his lungs- at his own peril. And while “The Simpsons” is not anyone’s paragon of virtue, hope or even familial example, Homer’s words still ring no less true.

As we watch black-and-white films of civil rights attacks from the 60’s, and cringe at the Holocaust atrocities of the 40’s, we dare not be so naïve to miss the fact that history is repeating herself. However, don’t be fooled. It isn’t through angry words and rhetoric that this is occurring, and not even because of those colleges and venues that boycott and allow the shouting down of speakers.

It won’t be due to judges being mocked and bullied from outside their own homes, or pro-lifers being accosted because of praying in front of abortion clinics. No, it will be because of those that knew it happened, those
that heard it happened, those that saw it happen, and those sat by as it happened-and did nothing.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened; stay tuned.

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The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 10, 2023

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger raise their right hands before testifying about Twitter Files and Censorship Complex — Sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play, and the problem isn’t that someone is donning a tinfoil hat but that he’s buried his head in the sand.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.

Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.

But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.

In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “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.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.

“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”

Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”

An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”

Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”

Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.

So who is this overlord of information, the Virality Project?

The Stanford Internet Observatory reports that it launched the Virality Project in response to the coronavirus, to conduct “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” Stanford expanded the project in January 2020, “with colleagues at New York University, the University of Washington, the National Council on Citizenship, and Graphika.”

Beyond collaboration with state-funded universities, the Virality Project, in its own words, “built strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC, to facilitate bidirectional situational awareness around emerging narratives.” According to the Virality Project’s 2022 report, “Memes, Magnets, and Microchips Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” “the CDC’s biweekly ‘COVID-19 State of Vaccine Confidence Insights’ reports provided visibility into widespread anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy narratives observed by other research efforts.”

The Virality Project’s report also championed its success in engaging six Big Tech platforms — Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), TikTok, Medium, and Pinterest — using a “ticket” system. The social media platforms would “review and act on” reports from the Virality Project, “in accordance with their policies.”

With the Virality Project working closely with the surgeon general and the CDC, which provided “vaccine hesitancy narratives” to the Stanford team, and the Stanford team then providing censorship requests to the tech giants, the government censorship loop was closed.

Censorship requests were not limited to Covid-19, however, with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership playing a similar role in providing Twitter — and presumably other Big Tech companies — requests to remove supposed election disinformation.

Earlier “Twitter Files” established that the Election Integrity Partnership was a conduit for censorship requests to Twitter for other government-funded entities, such as the Center for Internet Security. And in addition to receiving millions in government grants, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security partnered with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security — again completing the circle of government censorship we saw at play during the 2020 election cycle.

The groups involved in both the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project are also connected by government funding. The Election Integrity Partnership boasted that it “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Both Graphika and the University of Washington also partnered with Stanford for the Virality Project, along with individuals from New York University and the National Council on Citizenship.

Beyond the taxpayer-funded state universities involved in the projects, Graphika received numerous Department of Defense contracts and a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.” Graphika also received a nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping and had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.

The Atlantic Council likewise receives federal funding, including a grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center awarded to its Digital Forensics Research Lab. And Stanford rakes in millions in federal grants as well.

The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research.

But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants — just as was the case during the 2020 election.

This all goes to show that sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play and that the problem is not that someone is donning a tinfoil hat, but that he’s buried his head in the sand.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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The Astounding Saga of Hamilton 68 Illustrates Scope of America’s Institutional Rot

BY: EMILY JASHINSKY | JANUARY 31, 2023

EMILY JASHINSKY

VISIT ON TWITTER@EMILYJASHINSKY

The media fell head over heels for a shoddy propaganda operation spearheaded by an ex-FBI agent. Twitter, internally, understood the operation to be partisan hackery but never spoke out. Organizations full of influential ex-government officials promoted the operation. And it’s only thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent contribution to “The Twitter Files” that we know the full extent of institutional corruption in the mind-boggling case of Hamilton 68.

American intelligence operatives have a history of using credulous reporters to spread disinformation for political purposes. (Remember when President Nixon’s team forged cables about John F. Kennedy and tried to get them in Life? Or the fate of Jean Seberg and her baby, thanks in part to COINTELPRO and the Los Angeles Times?) We’ve learned more and more about this in the years after the Cold War, yet elite media outlets eagerly swallow tactical disinformation when it confirms their priors.

The consequence? Self-appointed disinformation police in government and media shape American politics with actual disinformation, crafted specifically to quiet dissent.

New Information

Given access to Twitter’s internal records by new CEO Elon Musk, Taibbi pulled the company’s communications surrounding Hamilton 68 and reported his findings last Friday. The project styled itself as a “dashboard” that tracked Russian disinformation on Twitter.

As Taibbi wrote, “The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked ‘to Russian influence activities online.’ It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first ‘reverse-engineered’ Hamilton’s list in late 2017.”

The files unearthed by Taibbi show Twitter’s internal audit of the Hamilton 68 list found it to be, in the words of former executive Yoel Roth, “bullish-t.”

“These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” another employee said. What Hamilton 68 was passing off as foreign disinformation was largely legitimate speech from anti-establishment American tweeters. Here’s Roth again: “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”

The “dashboard” confirmed elites’ bizarre anti-Trump Russia-collusion narrative by secretly classifying as Russian activity political speech from Americans with whom they disagreed.

Who ran Hamilton 68? Created by former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, the project was supported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the German Marshall Fund. That means a host of powerful former government officials with long histories in and around intelligence agencies promoted the shoddy research for years or, at the very least, were complicit in Hamilton 68’s work by lending their support. Watts himself is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor. (Bill Kristol is a member of the Alliance’s advisory board.)

Institutional Corruption

It gets so much worse on three fronts: academia, Big Tech, and media.

First, Taibbi notes the suspicious research was promoted uncritically by elite American universities, including Harvard and Princeton. Second, the files show Twitter declined to call out Hamilton 68 publicly, opting to “play a longer game here,” in the words of one employee who now advises Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation.

Third, and most importantly, Twitter’s efforts to privately nudge reporters away from the story failed miserably. Taibbi found, “[Emily] Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,’ she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” Horne works for the Biden administration as well.

This is a damning illustration of the institutional corruption rotting American politics and culture. You may wonder how ex-spooks could create a secret list, hide their results, pass off the research as legitimate, convince just about every major media outlet to run with the findings, convince elite universities to run with them, and keep Twitter quiet in the process. The answer is that some institutional powerbrokers are corrupt, some are inexcusably incompetent, and others are a combination.

Media Enable It All

If the media, however, had a semblance of the competence and virtue journalists claim to have, there would be much more incentive for powerful people in other institutions to stop behaving badly.

Watts and Co. did not make an honest mistake. When leftists at Twitter saw the same information, they immediately and literally called BS — privately, at least. Even their warnings could not dissuade dozens of journalists and politicians from blasting Hamilton 68’s findings to millions of Americans for years. This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.

“This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.“

Journalists did their part and took the bait. Bear in mind that NBC News and MSNBC have used Watts himself as a national security contributor for years, ignoring plenty of evidence that he was a dishonest propagandist using their airwaves to advance the interests of intelligence agencies. They actually used their own “disinformation” reporters to spread more disinformation.

My colleague Mollie Hemingway called this out all the way back in 2018, when the likes of Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, and an astounding array of media outlets were promoting Hamilton 68.

“Hamilton 68 won’t let anyone review their dashboard to determine in any way if they’re tracking actual Russian propaganda bots, or just conservative Americans who, for instance, care about FISA abuse,” Hemingway wrote. “Yet Hamilton 68’s claims are repeated uncritically by a media that asks no questions about the methodology.” (Twitter seemed to be misrepresenting its internal knowledge at the time, as well.)

Five years ago, making that point was met with attacks from anti-Trump activists who engaged in amateur intellectual gymnastics to classify every argument they disliked as Russian propaganda. The effect was to turn down the volume on people who were undercutting the campaign against Trump, empowering their own false narrative. Taibbi’s reporting vindicates the people who pushed back.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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The Left’s Response to Failure Is to Redefine It as Success

BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JULY 26, 2022

‘Recession’ is far from the first concept the left has simply redefined to deflect the consequences of their failed policies and ideas.

Author Elle Reynolds profile

ELLE REYNOLDS

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

In preparation for the close of the year’s second economic quarter, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has already started the spin: We’re not in a recession if we just redefine what a recession is.

“While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” the supposedly nonpartisan group said in a blog post on Thursday.

It’s doubtful the verbal smoke and mirrors will persuade the average Americans whose grocery bills keep growing as fast as their gas tanks empty. A recession is a sustained downturn in economic activity, and many Americans can feel it without knowing what the Q2 numbers are. But it’s far from the first concept the left has simply redefined to deflect the consequences of their failed policies and ideas.

One of their favorite words to redefine, apparently as “full and unchallenged political control,” is democracy. When actual democratic processes are at work — such as when an elected majority votes not to pass a pet piece of legislation, or when issues such as abortion law are left to elected representatives of the people at the state level — leftists scream their favorite catchphrase and call it a “threat to democracy.” They’ve levied that smear at everything from our bicameral legislature to the Supreme Court to the other party in our two-party system. It’s obvious they’re not really talking about democracy in any honest sense of the word. When democracy is a threat to their power, it simply gets redefined.

Another word that’s undergone a 180-degree redefinition is racism. No longer is it considered racist to treat someone differently based on his or her skin color, and not racist to value all human beings equally. Instead, if you’re not promoting theories that “remedy … past discrimination [with] present discrimination,” as critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi suggests, you are clearly a racist according to the left’s new dictionary. Do you believe in meritocracy? Racist. Think people are responsible for their own choices, and it’s neither possible nor beneficial for the government to dole out equivalent outcomes to everyone by force? Doubly racist. The new liturgy says that true equality lies in teaching some children that they’re part of a hopelessly oppressive system and other children that they’re hopelessly oppressed.

On the subject of pitting people against each other, the term “vaccine” has been ridiculously redefined to cover for the incompetence of the people who profit from them. After the shot that was promised to protect people from Covid transmission and infection failed to ward off either, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention simply changed the definition of “vaccine” to fit the narrative. “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” was quietly altered to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Barely a week later, Merriam-Webster followed suit by changing the definition of “anti-vaxxer” from someone who opposes vaccines to someone who doesn’t believe the government should mandate Covid shots.

Just last week, as part of the trans-crazed campaign to redefine what a woman is, Merriam-Webster added “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” to its definition of “female.” Categories such as “men” and “women” that are based in biological reality don’t suit the agenda that seeks to abolish those realities from minds and bodies. So rather than advocate their agenda within the bounds of reality, the left simply attempts to redefine reality itself. It’s apparent in the push to call women by the objectifying terms “pregnant persons,” “menstruating people,” etc. We saw it when then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told Congress she couldn’t define what a woman is, and it’s obvious in the attempts to put confused men in women’s prisons, shelters, and bathrooms. The reality of womanhood is in the way, so it’s being redefined out of existence.

And while abortion advocates lately have been willing to defend the act of killing a baby in the womb even with the understanding that it takes a human life, for years they’ve pushed their agenda by redefining an unborn baby as a “clump of cells” or some other dehumanizing description.

On any of those topics and more, leftists and their allies in Big Tech also persistently redefine any dissenting opinions or perspectives as disinformation, using that disingenuous label to erase opposition from channels of discourse.

Of course, many people who hear them prattle about “disinformation,” “birthing persons,” “anti-racism,” “threats to democracy,” and their host of other buzzwords know those words are nonsense. We can tell, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

But, as he noted, “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” The danger is in allowing these redefinitions of reality to be said, unchallenged, until enough people forget they could ever be challenged at all.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Plugs

A.F. BRANCO | on May 14, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-plugs-2/

Plugs Biden has plugged up the free flow of Domestic oil and now the free flow of speech with his Ministry of Truth.

Biden Ministry of Truth — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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This Insane 2020 Time Magazine Article Explains Exactly Why the Left Fears Losing Twitter

REPORTED BY: DAN O’DONNELL | APRIL 28, 2022

An astonishing but largely forgotten story in Time Magazine explains why there is so much leftist concern today about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

DAN O’DONNELL

Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.

“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,” he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”

You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”

“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”
And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.

The New York Post’s exclusive story dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing “smoking-gun emails” showing that the younger Biden introduced his father “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”

The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store’s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually “hacked materials” and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.

Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post’s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s, and the younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post’s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.

It didn’t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials “Russian disinformation,” it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.

Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, both The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center’s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.

“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,” Ball reported. “Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.”
She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly “toxic content” or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so “the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”

This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on “disinformation” that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to “save democracy” and defeat the “autocratic” Trump, it was censored.

“Democracy won in the end,” Ball concluded. “The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”

This reveals the real threat of Musk’s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.

Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.

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The Only Way to Fight Disinformation Is to Fight Political Censorship

REPORTED BY: STELLA MORABITO | APRIL 18, 2022

The surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.

STELLA MORABITO

VISIT ON TWITTER@STELLA_MORABITO

If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies. The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.

The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true. But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.

Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be. Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.

So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.

Unchecked Censorship Isolates People

Consider what happens if a society is only permitted one propagandistic narrative while all other ideas and information are silenced. People start self-censoring to avoid social rejection. The result is a form of imposed mental isolation. Severely isolated people tend to lose touch with reality. The resulting conformity also perpetuates the censorship. This is unnatural and dangerous because human beings depend on others to verify what’s real. People weren’t able to verify reality in Nazi Germany, during Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror, or during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution. All were societies in the grip of mass hysteria because of ruthless censorship to protect a narrative.

As psychiatrist Joost Meerloo noted in his book “The Rape of the Mind,” no matter how well-meaning political censorship might be, it creates dangerous conformity of thought: “the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking.”

The only way we can strengthen ourselves against such contagion is through real freedom of speech that allows fully open discussion and debate. However, if we’re confined by Big Tech to a relentless echo chamber and punished for expressing different thoughts, we’ll just keep getting more and more disinformation. In fact, we are now drowning in the distortions produced by “fact-checkers.” Take, for example, narratives that promote the gender confusion and sexualization of children. Public school teachers routinely post TikTok videos of themselves spewing forth their gender confusion. And if someone calls out Disney for its open grooming of children, Twitter suspends them.

If we never push back against such absurdities, we ultimately end up in a state of mass delusion, each of us a cell in a deluded hive mind, obedient to commands about what to say, how to act, and what to think. To get an idea of what that looks like in a population, check out this clip from North Korea:

Censorship-Invoked Social Contagion Is Real

One of the most telling incidents of censorship over the past year was YouTube and Twitter’s take-down of virologist and vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone, claiming he was “spreading misinformation”—i.e., spreading a second opinion—about Covid vaccines and treatments. But big tech saw an even bigger threat in Malone’s discussion of Mattias Desmet’s study of Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP) on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This is a big reason Spotify was under pressure to de-platform Rogan entirely. Open discussion of such things would erode the illusions big media and big tech so doggedly prop up.

Malone explained how a propaganda-saturated population can end up in a state of mass hypnosis that renders people incapable of seeing reality. He described Desmet’s theory about how social isolation, a high level of discontent, and a strong sense of free-floating anxiety are keys to the development of this psychosis.

The anxiety is so painful that it causes people to cling, trancelike, to any narrative that seems to offer stability. Once all other views are censored, people become so invested in the narrative that they cannot consider any alternative views. They will even mob anyone who endangers the narrative. This phenomenon was prevalent in the German population under Nazism. Their obedience to the propaganda rendered them incapable of understanding any opposing narrative.

Mass psychosis should not sound farfetched. There’s nothing new about it. Hundreds of instances of mass hysteria are documented. In the 19th century, Scottish journalist Charles MacKay wrote up a whole catalog of them. In 2015 medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew co-authored a compendium of popular delusions or “mass sociogenic illness.”

Most past incidents of mass hysteria have been confined to geographic regions, such as the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. But with the internet accessible and addictive in the 2020s, the possibility of mass delusion on a global scale is upon us. Censorship—in the name of protecting “democracy” from disinformation—is the key to creating it.

Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians

By definition, propaganda aims to psychologically affect people and change their attitudes. So, our social survival depends upon becoming aware of such phenomena. Building self-awareness about our vulnerability to crowd psychology would serve as a sort of psychological vaccine. Of course, elites do not want us even entertaining the possibility that we can be manipulated or vulnerable to social and psychological pressures. Propagandists are illusionists by nature. If their illusion falls apart, then the game is over for them. This is why they depend so heavily on the slur “conspiracy theorist” to distract us from the truth and from their use of censorship to cut us off from other ideas.

The late Nobel laureate Doris Lessing spoke against the dangers of social conformity and censorship in 1986. She noted there was a great body of knowledge that was continuing to be built about the laws of crowd psychology and social contagion. It was odd that we weren’t applying this knowledge to improve our lives. Lessing concluded that no government in the world would willingly help its citizens resist group pressures and learn to think independently. We have to do it ourselves. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and it sure looks like the keepers of this secret knowledge use it as a means of social control.

No sane person would want to live inside the boxes that the censors who claim to be fighting disinformation are building around us. If we want to escape this Twilight Zone existence, we must destroy that canard and insist on real freedom of speech everywhere.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.

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“Feminists” versus the Truth

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/feminists-versus-the-truth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LegalInsurrection+%28Le%C2%B7gal+In%C2%B7sur%C2%B7rec%C2%B7tion%29

Posted by Amy Miller

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

“They insist that women’s choices are not truly free.”

feminism vs the truth prager university

There’s nothing more offensive to me than an article that leaps off the cliff in the first sentence by dropping the “as a woman, I…” bomb.

It doesn’t matter how the sentence ends; what matters is that the author, whoever she may be, believes that on some level her gender proves her point for her.

We’re meant to accept everything that follows because to dissent is to deny not only her opinion, but her equal footing in society.

Fortunately, conservatives are doing the work to fight back this flawed idea that feminism consists entirely of the full acceptance of womanhood as victimhood:

Women in America are the freest in the world, yet many feminists tell us women are oppressed. They advocate this falsehood through victim mentality propaganda and misleading statistics, such as the gender wage gap myth. In five minutes, American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers tells you the truth about feminism.

One of the biggest mistakes the GOP has ever made is to think of women as this mysterious demographic, unattainable and uncomprehending in their pearls and their Ann Taylor sweater sets. For too long, we’ve let the left control the narrative and push this toxic idea that women are somehow “less than” because of policies Republicans support.

Like Christina says in the video, women today are the “freest and most liberated in human history.” Women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the founders of the first female fraternities are remembered not because they asserted their gender as the worthiest part of themselves, but because they asserted their personhood in a world that resisted their participation in history-making.

I can’t be the only one who believes that Susan B. Anthony would literally gag on her own irrepressible anger if she saw this happening in society:

From spearheading a constitutional amendment securing the right to vote, to dressing up as vaginas and yelling at passers by about coat hanger abortions, you’ve totally come a long way, baby.

Totally.

Meanwhile, women as a group are doing great, but modern feminists are so wrapped up in their own dogma that they literally are incapable of acknowledging how far we’ve come:

These feminists hardly acknowledge women’s progress. Yes, they concede that some advances have been made, but the fact that most women reject their activist brand of feminism and think of themselves as “free” is for this crowd proof of just how entrenched patriarchy and inequality truly are. Women are so oppressed, they don’t even know it.

Feminists do everything they can—even going so far as to use flawed statistics on the gender wage gap, depression, eating disorders, and even criminal victimization—to convince women that “their choices are not truly free.”

This isn’t education—it’s manipulation.

And they call the patriarchy oppressive.

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Posts tagged ‘disinformation’

It’s OK to be WHITE, Maybe

By: Lawrence Johnson | March 13, 2023

“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson

According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:

Cancel Culture Gone Crazy

Weighing In

The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 10, 2023

The Astounding Saga of Hamilton 68 Illustrates Scope of America’s Institutional Rot

BY: EMILY JASHINSKY | JANUARY 31, 2023

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Institutional Corruption

Media Enable It All

“This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.“

The Left’s Response to Failure Is to Redefine It as Success

BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JULY 26, 2022

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Plugs

“Feminists” versus the Truth

http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/feminists-versus-the-truth/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LegalInsurrection+%28Le%C2%B7gal+In%C2%B7sur%C2%B7rec%C2%B7tion%29

Posted by Amy Miller

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

This isn’t education—it’s manipulation.

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Posts tagged ‘disinformation’

By: Lawrence Johnson | March 13, 2023

“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson

According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:

Cancel Culture Gone Crazy

Weighing In

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BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MARCH 10, 2023

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BY: EMILY JASHINSKY | JANUARY 31, 2023

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Institutional Corruption

Media Enable It All

“This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.“

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BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | JULY 26, 2022

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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REPORTED BY: DAN O’DONNELL | APRIL 28, 2022

Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.

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REPORTED BY: STELLA MORABITO | APRIL 18, 2022

Unchecked Censorship Isolates People

Censorship-Invoked Social Contagion Is Real

Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians

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Posted by Amy Miller

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

This isn’t education—it’s manipulation.

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