Censorship Industrial Complex
2024 is Going to Give us All PTSD
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Terry Etam
And while there are crazies on either side of the spectrum, the difference is that right wing crazies are right wing crazies, and CBS News is CBS News.
The lazy days of summer serve a useful purpose. A few weeks away from everything clears the head, if one can escape the global cacophony. It works. Try it if you can; declutter the mind, step out of the fray. Upon returning, it seems possible to see the forest instead of the trees, to rejoin the info flow gradually from a disconnected, higher level.
Personally, it also helps to get disconnected from the energy world as well, and to travel to places far removed from the energy epicentre to take the pulse of people that have nothing to do with it.
Having said that, it can be a shock to realize how poorly energy is understood. It shouldn’t really be a shock, of course; it is a vast and complicated topic that almost no one understands in its entirety.
It’s not unreasonable though to ask that our leaders have a better grasp, but it is frightening to realize that they do not. We see senior policy makers and geopolitically-significant people/organizations/policy makers enacting suicidal energy policies (the examples are in the hundreds, but look at Germany’s decision to shut down much-needed nuclear power plants as the poster child).
The reason leaders are so eager to throw common sense out the window and embrace energy-ignorant policies is illuminated quite clearly when speaking with the average citizen about what everyone always talks about – the weather. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing but it’s a topic that can’t be avoided, and right there, right away, the wheels come off. Climate messaging has been so resoundingly successful that, in the public’s eye, any weather deviation whatsoever is proof of man-made climate change. The news cycle ramps this phenomenon up to a fever pitch. It’s so freaking draining; getting sidetracked in a weather conversation ruins my zen and I run away.
The attitude is so pervasive it is as though everyone has forgotten that heat waves/droughts/floods existed since time immemorial, and many ancient ones were far more severe than today’s events. But as we all know, once pop culture drills something into someone’s head long enough and loud enough, it becomes a truth (former Trudeau government bigwig Catherine McKenna, climate alarmist extraordinaire, was famously recorded explaining to an acquaintance in a bar how this works: “Just keep saying the same thing louder and louder and eventually they believe it.” (A not-dumb eastern Canadian lawyer explained to me that climate change was now so bad that the earth was actually heating up from the inside, which was her explanation for why the soil was dry some 6 feet down on her property. That kind of boldly asserted absurdity is not easily pounded into heads, but once it’s there, dynamite won’t get it out.)
It’s easy to point the finger at the general population and declare “they’re all stupid,” I hear that a lot, but it’s a bit unfair. They are energy ignorant, as are most, and when it come to alarmist messaging, well, when the government itself engages in scare tactics at the highest level, such as when federal leaders hint in their crazy way that extreme weather is something they can ultimately control through government policy, a lot of people kind of just sigh and accept it, they go with the flow.
The media machine, starved for attention, loves chaos and fear and flash. It encourages us to hate by zeroing in on the inflammatory. It encourages us to rage by taking positions, and draping itself in mock-innocence – “What? Us? Biased? Outrageous. We even have fact checkers!”
Yeah…about that… CBS News reports on the ‘no tax on tips’ idea. In June 2024, Trump proposed the idea of eliminating taxes payable on tip income. CBS news ran with the story on Twitter thusly: “Former President Donald Trump’s vow to stop taxing tips would cost the federal government up to $250 billion over 10 years, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group.”
In August 2024, two months later, Kamala Harris somehow came up with the exact same policy, and CBS News covered her theft thusly: “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
They don’t even care any more. There is no shame, or self-reflection, no hesitancy. It’s pure peacock feathers.
And while there are crazies on either side of the spectrum, the difference is that right wing crazies are right wing crazies, and CBS News is CBS News.
While it is a generational thing to think that times have never been more crazy, it is hard to put today’s weirdness into any sort of historical context. “The News” is a relatively recent phenomenon in the big scheme of things, hardly more than a century or two old, and thus it is a living object, morphing over time as communications capabilities change, and as we become more interconnected at light speed. Fifty years ago we either waited for a daily or weekly newspaper to find out what was happening in the world, or tuned in to a nightly television program that chose the stories for us and read them aloud in some soothing voice.
We were told what the news was to the extent the news organizations could unearth or cover it, in a time when the ability to cover bigger events on the other side of the world was almost nonexistent. Crack reporters did great work speaking to people who either witnessed or participated in events, and politics covered what was known about what politicians were up to, and not much may have been known at all. In fact those politicians were acting in huge information vacuums as well.
Today, it’s wide open. We see everything. At least we do in the west, not so much in totalitarian states, but even there we can observe a lot. We have eyes on everything including live flight trackers doing their thing every minute of the day on social media, we can see a graphic of every trip Taylor Swift’s jets made over then course of a year (yes, she has two, apparently, another bit of trivia I have no justification or enthusiasm for knowing).
We also see an infinite assessment of government policy, how it comes to be, how it’s enacted, how it’s enforced, how it is playing out, like we never have before in history. The feedback loops are constant and detailed, and while the information is sometimes distorted for ideological purposes, the preponderance of analysis does tend to zero in on what is actually happening, shorn of much of the spin.
We can see the genesis of much of today’s craziness. One gets the feeling, from a high-enough thought plane, that some well-educated and well-funded people decided to make some very big tectonic moves that would put the world on a better path. Being God’s gift to central planning, this global who’s who fully embraced radical – and I do mean radical – change as a prerequisite for human survival. (The IPCC for example said that, to achieve climate targets, there would need to be an unprecedented rewiring and rebuilding of pretty much the entire world, quickly. They offered no advice, just “do it or you all perish” and that was enough for the WEF crowd to pool their billions and buy the best politicians they could.)
Our western leaders, full of oats, delusions of grandeur, and a blank checkbook/chequebook – because they don’t understand the cold hard realities of how to run a successful economic enterprise – went for broke, looking to go down in history as visionaries that bent the trajectory of modern life as we know it. They burned bridges – no going back, no second guessing (any second-guessing is now deemed ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’).
What we see all around us is the detritus of their failure, on so many levels, and we don’t really know what to do about it. We’ve been conditioned to accept that the ‘experts’ know what they are doing, and that capable hands will guide us through whatever fate throws at us. We turn to the simplistic world of pop culture for explanations because the stone cold reality of things is just too hard to wrap our heads around, and we don’t want to spend our days trying to figure it all out.
We are still people, and it is dumb to expect a solid grounding of complex topics that the media distorts mercilessly to pander to the fear.
And yes there are of course flat out fools, across the political spectrum and beyond. Feel free to discount them entirely. Luckily, let’s be honest, no matter our political persuasion, they’re generally not hard to spot, which is why attempting to limit free speech is such a fool’s game.
On the other hand, it appears the world’s attention is going to be dominated by the upcoming US election, and it is going to be so freaking far out and insane that it will be hard to reach December without PTSD.
Some words to keep in mind when things become so crazy it seems like it isn’t real (if you think that’s hyperbole, consider that Russia’s war against Ukraine, a bonafide war with tanks and bombs and death and endless heartache, often sadly doesn’t even make the front page, pushed aside by madness in the US, UK, Middle East, Africa…).
We are in a period of turmoil where people don’t know where to turn. Most have been led to believe that they are fundamentally bad, either through their consumption choices or their preference for “what was good before” or if their belief system doesn’t line up exactly with the mainstream narrative.
As a wise friend recently pointed out, in times of trouble people seek out “messiahs”, they look for a jolt from an outsider, because the “inside”, the swamp, has let them down and left them disoriented. Remember that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Many, many people, perhaps a majority, are willing to overlook his bombastic antics because he represents a hope that can only come from the outside. As proof of this notion, consider this quote from an astonishing source – John Lydon of the band Public Image Ltd., formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, the ultimate punk of all punks, speaking of Trump: “He’s a thoroughly unpleasant fellow, no doubt about it. But he’s not a politician and I hate politicians! Screw the lot of ‘em. I’d rather have a maniac…a real estate land shark. There will be no world carrying on as long as we keep enforcing dogmas.”
No matter what happens over the next year or two, we will find a new equilibrium just as the world did post WWII. What it will look like is a good question, but there will be some sort of stability.
Probably. What the hell do I know. Good luck.
Rest assured that the future of energy providers is as strong as it ever has been, no matter what you hear on the airwaves. Energy will be the last industry standing, no matter what happens.
Terry Etam is a columnist with the BOE Report, a leading energy industry newsletter based in Calgary. He is the author of The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity. You can watch his Policy on the Frontier session from May 5, 2022 here.
From the Brownstone Institute
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Author
Censorship Industrial Complex
Congressional investigation into authors of ‘Disinformation Dozen’ intensifies
From LifeSiteNews
By Dr. Michael Nevradakis of The Defender
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, authors of ‘The Disinformation Dozen,’ faces a Nov. 21 deadline to provide Congress with documents related to its alleged collusion with the Biden administration and social media platforms to censor online users.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), authors of the “Disinformation Dozen,” faces a Nov. 21 deadline to provide Congress with documents related to its alleged collusion with the Biden administration and social media platforms to censor online users.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, on Nov. 7 subpoenaed CCDH as part of an ongoing congressional investigation, launched in August 2023, into the nonprofit’s censorship-related activities.
The subpoena requests all communications and documents “between or among CCDH, the Executive Branch, or third parties, including social media companies, relating to the identification of groups, accounts, channels, or posts for moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation.”
The subpoena also requests all records, notes, and other “documents of interactions between or among CCDH and the Executive Branch referring or relating to ‘killing’ or taking adverse action against Elon Musk’s X social media platform (formerly Twitter).”
CCDH previously included Kennedy on its “Disinformation Dozen” list, published in March 2021, of the 12 “leading online anti-vaxxers.”
Leaked CCDH documents released last month by investigative journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi revealed that CCDH sought to “kill” Twitter and launch “black ops” against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
CCDH included Kennedy, founder of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), on its list of “The Disinformation Dozen” when he was still chairman of CHD.
“Black ops” are defined as a “secret mission or campaign carried out by a military, governmental or other organization, typically one in which the organization conceals or denies its involvement.”
A subsequent report by Taibbi and Thacker showed that CCDH employed tactics it initially developed to help U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the U.S. Democratic Party, to target Musk, Kennedy and others.
CCDH used ‘explicit military terminology’ to target speech
Thacker told The Defender the leaked documents “definitely spurred” Jordan’s subpoena.
Sayer Ji, the founder of GreenMedInfo, was also listed among “The Disinformation Dozen.” He said the leaked documents were “chilling” and that CCDH’s efforts were part of “the largest coordinated foreign influence operation targeting American speech since 1776.”
Ji told The Defender:
The leaked documents confirm what we experienced firsthand: CCDH wasn’t just targeting 12 individuals – we were test cases for deploying military-grade psychological operations against civilians at scale.
Just as the British Crown once used seditious libel laws to silence colonial dissent, CCDH’s operation expanded to silence hundreds of millions globally, from doctors sharing clinical observations to parents discussing vaccine injuries.
Ohio physician Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, also on “The Disinformation Dozen” list, told The Defender, “The exposure of the manipulation that went on behind the scenes to silence us is what we suspected, and now we know … We have the sad last laugh against their attacks. They are the ones with blood on their hands.”
Ji said CCDH’s internal communications reveal not just bias, “but explicit military terminology – ‘black ops,’ ‘target acquisition,’ ‘strategic deployment’ – coordinated between Five Eyes networks and dark money interests to target constitutionally protected speech.”
Writing on GreenMedInfo, Ji said, “CCDH’s ‘black ops’ approach includes coordinated media smears, economic isolation, and digital censorship.” Ji said CCDH’s activities represent “a new level of institutionalized power directed at civilian targets, often bypassing constitutional safeguards.”
Thacker said Jordan’s investigation should expand to include CCDH’s “black ops.”
“I don’t want to speculate on what CCDH was doing with ‘black ops’ against Kennedy,” Thacker said. “I think that should be explored by a congressional committee, with CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed put under oath,” Thacker said.
CCDH facing multiple lawsuits, possible Trump administration investigation
Jordan’s subpoena is the latest in a series of legal challenges for CCDH. According to GreenMedInfo, the organization faces several lawsuits and government investigations.
Following last month’s CCDH document leak, the Trump campaign said an investigation into CCDH “will be at the top of the list.”
The campaign also filed a complaint against the Harris campaign with the Federal Election Commission, “for making and accepting illegal foreign national contributions” – namely, from the U.K. Labour Party.
This followed the release of evidence indicating that the Biden administration coordinated with the U.K. Foreign Office as part of what GreenMedInfo described “as a systematic censorship regime involving CCDH and affiliated organizations.”
A lawsuit Musk filed against CCDH in July 2023 for allegedly illegally obtaining data and using it in a “scare campaign” to deter advertisers from X will likely proceed on appeal. A federal court initially dismissed the lawsuit in March.
Discovery in the Missouri v. Biden free speech lawsuit may also “shed further light and legal scrutiny on the critical role that CCDH played in allegedly suppressing and violating the civil liberties of U.S. citizens,” according to GreenMedInfo.
CCDH, others flee X in protest
Earlier this week, CCDH deleted its account on X, the platform it wanted to “kill.”
Writing on Substack, Ji said CCDH’s departure from X, during the same week Trump nominated Kennedy to lead HHS, represents a “seismic shift” and marks “a watershed moment, signaling the unraveling of entrenched systems of control and the rise of a new era for health freedom and open discourse.”
Several other left-leaning organizations and individuals, including The Guardian and journalist Don Lemon, also said they will stop using X, after Trump tapped Musk to lead a federal agency tasked with increasing government efficiency.
According to NBC News, many ordinary users are also fleeing X, citing “bots, partisan advertisements and harassment, which they all felt reached a tipping point when Donald Trump was elected president last week with Musk’s support.”
But according to Adweek, X’s former top advertisers, including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Lionsgate Entertainment, resumed ad spending on the platform this year, but at “much lower rates” than before.
“Elon Musk’s ties with Donald Trump might spur some advertisers to think spending on X is good for business,” Adweek reported.
Thacker said CCDH’s deletion of its X account was “aligned” with the departure of “other organizations and ‘journalists’ aligned with the Democratic Party.” He said it appears to have been a “coordinated protest.”
Ji said organizations like CCDH view X “as an existential threat.” He added:
Having experienced both Twitter 1.0’s AI-driven censorship system and X’s more open environment, I understand exactly why CCDH sees X as an existential threat. X represents what Twitter 1.0’s embedded censorship infrastructure was designed to prevent: a truly free digital public square.
Under Musk’s commitment to free speech, their tactical advantage disappeared. They’re not leaving because X is toxic. They’re leaving because they can’t control it.
Online censorship ‘may no longer be sustainable under intensified scrutiny’
According to GreenMedInfo, CCDH’s departure from X “appears to reflect an internal recognition that their operational model – characterized by critics as a US-U.K. intelligence ‘cut-out’ facilitating unconstitutional suppression of civil liberties – may no longer be sustainable under intensified scrutiny.”
In recent months, several mainstream media outlets have corrected stories that relied upon CCDH reports claiming “The Disinformation Dozen” was responsible for up to two-thirds of vaccine-related “misinformation” online.
According to Thacker, this reflects an increasing awareness by such outlets that readers are turning their backs on such reporting.
“The outlets that promoted CCDH propaganda are being investigated by their own readers, who are fleeing in droves. Readers are voting against this type of propaganda by refusing to subscribe to these media outlets,” Thacker said.
Yet, “many outlets continue to host these demonstrably false narratives without correction,” Ji said.
According to Ji, these false narratives resulted in medical professionals fearing the loss of their licenses for expressing non-establishment views, self-censorship among scientists “to avoid career destruction,” suppression of “critical public health discussions” and the labeling of millions of posts as “misinformation.”
“This isn’t just about suppressing speech. It’s about establishing a new form of digital control that echoes the colonial-era suppression our founders fought against,” Ji said.
“CCDH has polluted political discourse by pretending there is some absolute definition of the term ‘misinformation’ and that they hold the dictionary,” Thacker said. “That’s nonsense. They spread hate and misinformation to attack perceived political enemies of the Democratic Party.”
Ji called upon Congress to investigate “The full scope of those silenced beyond the ‘Disinformation Dozen,’” the “systematic suppression of scientific debate,” “media organizations’ role in amplifying foreign influence operations” and “dark money funding networks” supporting such organizations.
Thacker said Congress should examine possible CCDH violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. “We need to also look at how much foreign money they took in and whether we as a nation are comfortable with foreign influence trying to alter the law and political discussions.”
“The fight isn’t just about correcting past wrongs or personal vindication. It’s about preserving fundamental rights to free speech and scientific inquiry in the digital age,” Ji said. “If we don’t address this systematic abuse of power, we risk surrendering the very freedoms our founders fought to establish.”
This article was originally published by The Defender – Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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