Can the Ukraine Win the War Against Free Speech?

The two most pressing issues of the day are Elon Musk’s plan to reinstate freedom of speech on Twitter and an impending war with Russia. Maybe these two issues can be tied together?

First, let’s take a trip down Memory Lane and remember how we got to the point where we are begging a billionaire to please just allow us to state our opinions in public.

The initial explanation of mass internet censorship was that people were saying mean things and that it was hurting the feelings of protected groups. In 2015, Chuck Johnson was the first person to be banned from Twitter for political reasons. That was followed shortly thereafter by the banning of MILO. Both were banned for allegedly hurting the feelings of black people. Daily Stormer was banned from everything in 2017, ostensibly for joking about a morbidly obese woman dying at the Charlottesville rally. Alex Jones was banned from YouTube and Facebook for allegedly hurting the feelings of Sandy Hook parents, and then banned from Twitter for allegedly hurting the feelings of a journalist who was working to get him banned from everything.

The word “safety” was then introduced into the discourse by every Silicon Valley mega corporation. This was apparently derived from the term “safe space,” which was a buzzword used at universities and in HR departments to denote a special area where allegedly oppressed persons were able to flee from harmful “triggering” words, ideas, or people. The idea was that certain ideas caused oppressed people – women, racial minorities, and paraphiliacs – to become emotionally unstable, and that this emotional instability was dangerous. The entire mainstream internet quickly became a “safe space” for all of these groups, which meant that you were not allowed to say anything they did not like.

Of course, that was all a massive and ridiculous ruse. The actual force behind the censorship was the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish and Israeli lobbying group. The ADL was going around threatening companies with defamation for years if they didn’t engage in mass censorship of “hate speech.” The group is obviously worried exclusively about the threat of people riling up the population against the Jews by posting information about them, but since the Jews are the single wealthiest and most powerful group in the world, demanding exclusive protection for the Jews from “harmful speech” would have been ridiculous. For this reason, the ADL and the larger Jewish lobby dragged in all of these other groups to use as human shields, demanding protections for “women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.”

The ADL’s demands against Silicon Valley with regards to mass censorship go back over a decade. I remember them heating up in 2014, when then ADL chief Abe Foxman began publicly demanding that Facebook remove pages criticizing the Jews. Here is an article he wrote at the time for CNET, whining about how Mark Zuckerberg would not censor “racist speech and hateful propaganda, including Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.”

Johnson and MILO were banned for alleged anti-black speech during the first round of Black Lives Matter, and several others deemed “too extreme” were picked off over a period of a couple years. However, it was not really until the election of Trump, and then Charlottesville, that the ADL was really able to get its hooks into Silicon Valley. Along with the moral panics over Trump and “white supremacy,” there were sub-panics relating to “fake news,” the most prominent of which was Pizzagate, which spun into the QAnon disinformation threat.

The claims of “fake news” were ultimately more damaging to perceptions of what it means to live in a free society than “hate speech” claims. The claim was that citizens – people who vote, who ostensibly have the wherewithal to decide who runs the government – were incapable of looking at different types of ideas and drawing conclusions about them, and therefore needed to be babysat by multinational corporations.

Once again, it was the Jewish lobby that presented the concept of “fact checkers” to decide whose news items people were allowed to consume. FactCheck.org had been founded all the way back in 2003 by the Annenberg Foundation, a Jewish activist and lobbying group run by the Annenberg family. In September of 2017, as politically biased “fact-checking” was becoming key to censorship, the Association for Psychological Science published a paper from the Annenberg Public Policy Center giving instructions on how to most effectively “fact-check.” This was effectively a guidebook that was then followed by Snopes and other fact-checkers.

With the ADL already heavily involved in regulating speech on all major platforms via “Trust and Safety Committees,” these alleged checkers of facts – primarily FactCheck.org and Snopes – were contracted out as “third-party” censors. The tech companies would point to fact checks as a reason for deleting articles, banning accounts, or simply “deranking” (shadowbanning) the content in question. It goes without saying that very few actual facts were checked, and that the supposed fact checkers understood that their role was to simply declare that whatever the New York Times said was the de facto word of God.

By the time the alleged coronavirus pandemic began, people were already adapted to the idea that entire categories of thought could be banned. Under the virus regime, the media introduced the idea of banning “medical disinformation.” The assertion here was once again that “safety” was at stake, because people could read wrong information, act on it, and then die from the coronavirus. During the supposed pandemic, these “fact-checkers” would simply take the word of the CDC, the WHO, and Anthony Fauci as the final word on the facts. Through this third-party fact-checker censorship mechanism, any disagreement with the government on the death toll, masks, and the vaccine was banned. At one point, Trump retweeted a screenshot from the CDC website relating to comorbidities, and it was deleted on the basis of fact-checkers having determined that it was “taken out of context.”

We all remember how we were told the vaccine would stop all transmission and prevent infection, then told that actually it didn’t do either of those things, but it was still very important to take it, because the experts said so. Last year, during the height of the virus hype, the Biden Administration admitted that they were working directly with Silicon Valley corporations to silence people who questioned the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Then, earlier this year, Jen Psaki went on to demand that Joe Rogan be banned for having questioned the danger posed by the virus and the effectiveness of the vaccine.

So, at this point, you no longer had simply massive corporations protecting the feelings of oppressed minorities, or protecting the feeble minds of the citizenry from unsafe ideas, but the government itself engaged in direct censorship. This is obviously illegal, but there aren’t really any checks left in terms of what the American government is allowed to do to the American people.

Then we get to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine in February of this year, and the biggest censorship campaign thus far. The censorship of any information about what is going on in the Ukraine has been more extreme than even the censorship of vaccine information. There are millions of people across the world attempting to share videos from the Ukraine, and they are consistently deleted by social media, with accounts being banned simply for supporting Russia. Moreover, all information from Russia itself is banned. The American public is not even allowed to know what the Russian government is saying about what is going on in the Ukraine. They are not allowed to see videos of mobs of Ukrainians taping people to posts, or neo-Nazis torturing people. They are not allowed to see really any video of the conflict zone at all.

TV news reporters go only to Lviv, where there isn’t a war. Granted, the Ukrainian military appears to have an actual policy of killing Western reporters; they can kill whoever they want because they know the entire Western media will blame it on Russia. (A Fox News reporter survived a Ukrainian attack on his car – his legs were blown off. It will be interesting to see if he is brave enough to speak out.) But even with on-the-ground reporters getting blown up, the media could still show footage from the conflict. The media plays clips from cellphone videos all the time. But that is all banned. No one is allowed to know what is happening in the Ukraine. You have to support the Ukraine, which is committing atrocities against its own people, and you have to believe the Ukraine is “winning the war.” You’re not allowed to hear another perspective, which means you’re not allowed to entertain any other ideas.

The thing that is so amazing about this is that the biggest censorship campaign yet does not have any explanation. Neither Twitter, nor YouTube, nor any other platform has even acknowledged that they are mass deleting videos and information from the Ukraine. They acted like banning RT was a sanction on a Russian business, as opposed to a censorship program. No accounts were given. Either they’ve censored so much they just don’t feel a need to explain themselves anymore, or not acknowledging the censorship is part of the censorship – to say “we’re censoring people who disagree with the government’s Ukraine narrative” would be to admit that there are people who disagree with the government’s Ukraine narrative. Aside from a handful of Congressmen and Rand Paul, 100% of the government supports the narrative. All of Fox News is standing with CNN in standing with Ukraine, save for Tucker Carlson. The impression is “everyone on earth agrees with this.”

This is the point at which Elon Musk made a move to buy Twitter, with the promise of giving the people total freedom of speech within the bounds of the First Amendment. What Musk appears to be doing is making a move on the entrenched power structure with an appeal to populism while he views the empire as increasingly losing control. This system is so totally based on lies that it simply could not survive a situation where people are allowed to freely speak on the most influential media platform in the world. If they didn’t need this censorship, they wouldn’t be doing it.

I have argued consistently that the entire bizarre coronavirus debacle would have been impossible without mass censorship. Very early on, myself and others documented the facts of the situation, particularly in relation to the death toll being completely faked. The authorities (who are also the “experts”) have since come out and admitted that the death toll was drastically inflated because anyone who went to the hospital for any reason was tested for the virus, and anyone who died of any cause was put down as a Covid death. This was often done even without a test. Musk himself went on Joe Rogan in May of 2020 and said all of this. Without censorship, the lockdown could have been avoided, and there never would have been a need for a vaccine at all, let alone an experimental gene therapy.

There was massive fraud in the 2020 election, but that would not have been possible without censorship. Firstly, the fraud itself would not have been possible without the coronavirus allowing for the mail-in ballots (which is where the fraud took place – not in some Kraken Chinese electronic cyber voting machine). Secondly, virtually all of Trump’s supporters were banned in the lead up to the election, and information was drastically censored in favor of the Democrats – including the censoring of the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story, which was labeled “Russian misinformation” by the media and Biden himself. A poll showed that 16% of Biden voters would not have voted for Biden if they’d known about the laptop. This would have made even mail-in ballot fraud impossible.

Thirdly, after the election, everyone was banned from talking about fraud. Trump himself was of course banned. People were attempting to crowdsource the information on what had happened, and collect it to push for audits in swing states – they were just all banned. Instead, you got the Kraken (which appears to have been deliberate sabotage by Sidney Powell).

Musk clearly has his own designs on political power, as there is simply no other reason he would take this kind of risk. Even if he was doing it out of pure altruism, that altruism would have to be connected to a desire to gain some form of political power, because if he doesn’t gain political power, he will be crushed by the system.

The Twitter buyout is the biggest thing that has happened since the election of Trump, and it is arguably much more significant than the election of Trump. The empire is cracking at the seams, and actually allowing people to speak would just simply break it.

It’s a fascinating development. Musk surely has his own team behind him here, and believes he can win, or he wouldn’t be doing it. I personally have a hard time believing he can win. Either way, there is no backing down now. He will win or die. Even if he were to back down now, he has already directly assaulted the establishment, and there is no way he is going to be able to get away with that unless he is leveraging massive power against the Washington establishment.

Musk saying “haha, okay well, I’m not going to really do free speech” and the elite forgetting what he’s done would be like if you broke into someone’s house, killed the dog, tied up the family, raped the wife, and then while you were opening the safe, the cops showed up and you said “haha, I wasn’t really going to rob them” and the cops said “okay sure, no problem then – you can go.”

Can the Ukraine Win the War Against Free Speech?

We have been examining the American situation, because that is where these tech companies are and where it is all happening. However, in Europe, several countries have made it illegal to show any form of support for Russia. This includes Germany, which is threatening to put people in prison for posting the letter “Z” on the internet.

Obviously, Europe has arbitrary speech laws. They can outlaw any form of speech at any time. America on the other hand does have a very clear Constitution which says we are allowed to say what we want to say. Up until last year when Psaki admitted that the Biden people were telling social media companies to ban more people, we were in a situation of “private companies” depriving us of our rights. I have argued that the government has a duty to defend our rights, and therefore stop corporations from colluding to silence political speech. I have asked if Google has a right to quarter soldiers in my house. However in a technical, Talmudic sense, there was an argument to be made that because the government was not directly censoring people, it was somehow different.

That said: the United States has suspended the First Amendment during wartime, repeatedly. In fact, wartime censorship goes back to the foundations of America, before the Constitution was even written. During the Revolutionary War, many colonies made it illegal to support the Crown. The Sedition Act of 1798 criminalized the “writing, printing, uttering or publishing [of] any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings about the government of the United States.” This law was used to shut down newspapers. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln seized the telegraph lines, and people were arrested and imprisoned for supporting the Confederacy. Many newspapers were shut down, including the Chicago Times, for criticizing Lincoln. People were arrested for simply displaying Confederate flags. A Democrat politician was imprisoned for calling Lincoln “King Lincoln” and criticizing the war. During World War I, the Sedition Act of 1918 suspended the First Amendment. Same thing. Newspapers shut down, people prosecuted for questioning politicians. Then, the day after Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave J. Edgar Hoover “emergency powers” to shut down newspapers. 

The first war where speech wasn’t silenced through some direct action by the government was Korea – also the first war with no real stakes. Obviously, no one was prosecuted for supporting Saddam Hussein or the Taliban.

An open war with Russia would be existential, and there is a 100% chance that Congress would cite historical precedent and pass a very serious sedition act. Of course, you all know what this would mean: it wouldn’t simply be a ban on posting “Z” or saying you support Russia – it would be a ban on literally everything. Because since 2016, everything that the Democrats do not like has been labeled “Russian disinformation.” It’s the perfect setup. Russia hacked the 2016 election. The fact-checkers said that Hunter Biden’s laptop was from Russia, so they shut it down so the Russians didn’t hack it again. Pizzagate was from Russia. Anti-vax was from Russia. Russia created the Alt-Right. Russia is the master of Alex Jones. Russia promotes masculinity and going to the gym.

Putin has said he will launch hypersonic missiles at Europe if NATO invades the Ukraine. But if NATO doesn’t invade, this Ukraine thing is going to be wrapping up pretty soon, and the entire Western apparatus will be left trying to explain why they told everyone the Ukraine was somehow going to repel the Russian army.

At the very least, the threat of Elon Musk bringing free speech to Twitter, along with all of the other extraordinary domestic power the very unpopular US government could wield during wartime, is a very good reason to escalate rather than back down.