Governments have lost control of the narrative that they are in
control of events. Everyday I wake up to another instance of outrageous
censorship from some ‘social media’ company blocking or banning someone for no
apparent reason.
The
latest outrage is Twitter banning the account of Wikileaks publisher Julian
Assange’s mother, Christine.
Australian and New Zealand ISPs have gone bonkers IP blocking
sites in the wake of the Christchurch massacre. Sites like Zerohedge have been
targeted in the past two weeks for publishing narratives orthogonal to what the
governments in the West are comfortable with people consuming.
First it was Facebook, blocking and then unblocking Zerohedge
with no apparent reasoning behind it. Now its ISP’s over-reacting to an
emotional event ensuring that a good crisis never goes to waste.
And these ISPs are going much farther than just avoiding any
potential legal liabilities. They are now openly calling for the platforms
themselves — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — be regulated by governments to stop
‘dangerous information’ from reaching the eyeballs of consumers.
And another mask is ripped off revealing the ugly totalitarians
underneath.
It begins with legitimizing de-platforming people like Alex
Jones and social media companies like Gab. Because some speech is too free.
These are people supposedly too fringe to be suffered.
So it’s easy to whip up some public support for censorship of
them alongside a one-sided media bombardment of justify their silencing to a
large swath of people.
Are You
Now Or Have You Ever Been…?
It’s especially easy to do this after having whipped everyone up
into two camps of highly polarized and radicalized camps across multiple
political vectors.
Trump vs. Liberals in the U.S.
Remainers vs. Leavers in the U.K.
Open borders vs. Immigration control across the West
Global warming alarmists vs. skeptics in Europe
Gun Control vs. American Deplorables.
I could go on and on.
All of these false dualities, false divides are meant to drive
us into two camps and act as a barrier to communication. As a sh&tlib are
you more or less willing to suffer an argument for free speech if it comes from
a Deplorable?
We all know the answer to that question.
And vice versa is also equally true. Deplorables don’t want to
deal with Trump’s shortcomings as President because it’s a betrayal of MAGA.
Make no mistake, this polarization of electorates all around the
world was planned. It’s part and parcel of the divide and conquer strategy
which preps the rhetorical ground preceding color revolutions.
If it begins with de-platforming Alex Jones, it ends with what
we’re seeing today. Now it’s no longer banning Alex Jones because he supposedly
harassed families of Sandy Hook victims. Now it’s jailing people for sharing
the video of the Christchurch madman’s self-aggrandizement video.
Catching up Zerohedge in this censorship net makes it obvious
that this was a plan of action waiting for a catalyst to set in motion. Since
Zerohedge never once hosted the Christchurch video.
Less
than a week after Facebook ‘mistakenly’ banned us for two days with no
explanation following several reports which were critical of the social media
giant, we learned that Zero Hedge has now been banned in New
Zealand and Australia, despite the fact that we never
hosted video footage of the Christchurch attack. We were not
contacted prior to the censorship. Instead, we have received a steady flood of
people noting that the site is unavailable in the two countries unless a
VPN is used.
Simply put this is the next escalation in the censorship war
against the alternative press and citizen journalism.
For the
Children!
The
steady stream of drivel from lawmakers around
the world about social media regulation is in the name of
protecting the people.
Now the ISPs and the platforms want to get together and police
the content, giving it the veneer of private party self-control, rather than
heavy-handed government censorship.
That’s nonsense. All of these companies owe their existence
either to direct government investment or support through government-granted
franchise monopolies and other market distortions which built barriers to entry
for competition.
So this is not, as the totalitarian anti-free-speech Left would
tell us, an expression of their right to or not to host content they disagree
with. It is purely about assuming and exerting control over what we are allowed
to think.
It’s simply censorship by proxy, the hallmark of an end-state
corporatist oligopoly.
But it’s never about protecting the people. It’s about
protecting governments from the people finding out the inconvenient truth that
they aren’t in control of anything anymore.
And they are scared to death of us using these communications
tools debunking their lies, omissions and agendas in real time.
Without them there is no Brexit. There is no Trump. There is no
Salvini, Orban or Putin, frankly.
Remember, they may think they are the smartest people in the
room, but they are not smarter than the people collectively in the room itself.
And they know this.
So it’s now time to shrink the room. Remove the people from the
room (Internet itself) so that the information cannot be worked over by the
collective wisdom of millions.
Do You
Think You’re Being Treated Unfairly?
On every issue I listed above government’s are losing the
argument. People know why this push for censorship is happening. People like
George Soros and Tom Steyer have been building this plan to concentrate traffic
onto a limited number of bandwidth providers (net neutrality) and mobile
platform providers (Google, Apple) for over a decade.
And once the success of sites like Patreon and other
crowd-funding mechanisms began to siphon off the need to enslave content
creators to advertising revenue, they had to be brought into this as well.
The net result is the swift un-personing of someone who speaks a
little too much truth to power to a few too many people. The sad truth is that
this is only the beginning of the censorship.
The good news is that people are too clever by half. And the
censorship of today quickly turns into the new opportunities for tomorrow. I’m
looking forward to the day of blockchain-based, peer-to-peer networking
information sharing. 5G could easily being that to life in a way that changes
how we communicate in a mass sense in real time.
Because this push for massive censorship is proof positive that
we are winning. If they weren’t scared of their planned future being in
jeopardy they wouldn’t be ripping off the masks now.
IP blocking is the easiest thing to get around.
A free VPN built into a browser, like Opera’s, gets around this.
It hasn’t stopped The Pirate Bay. It won’t stop Zerohedge. Until, of course,
Apple and Google pull all the VPN apps from their App Stores due to government
regulations.
And that will be the next phase of the censorship.
If our faith in our governments wasn’t failing we wouldn’t be
watching the drama over Brexit. Brexit would have been betrayed back in
December. But the politicians are scared of the consequences now.
And they are desperate to shift the blame for getting what they
want, remaining in the EU, to the other party.
The same thing is happening in Europe. Euroskeptics are rising.
The rejection of globalism is everywhere. Their Internet regulations (Article
11 and 13) are, like net neutrality, solutions in search of problems. And their
goal is to stifle speech critical of their activity.
But it is simply a desperate attempt to finish a project that
has not a prayer of surviving. And we have to remain not only vigilant but
nimble to stay on the air.
Join the Gold Goats ‘n Guns Patreon to help us
keep the pressure on them to keep the truth on the air.