Censorship Industrial Complex
Lockdowns Codified a World of Violence
From the Brownstone Institute
During the misnamed and mostly preposterous debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a moderator fact-checked Trump’s claim that crime is up. In contrast to his claim, he said that the FBI reports that crime is down, a claim that likely struck every viewer as obviously wrong.
Shoplifting was not a way of life before lockdowns. Most cities were not demographic minefields of danger around every corner. There was no such thing as a drug store with nearly all products behind locked Plexiglas. We weren’t warned of spots in cities, even medium-sized ones, where carjacking was a real risk.
It is wildly obvious that high crime in the US is endemic, with ever less respect for person and property. As for the FBI’s statistics, they are worth about as much as most data coming from federal agencies these days. They are there for purposes of propaganda, manipulated to present the most favorable picture possible to help the regime.
This is certainly true of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, which have been shoveling out obvious nonsense for years. Professionals in the field know it but go along for reasons of professional survival. In truth, we’ve never had a real economic recovery since lockdowns.
Crime is up. Literacy is down. Trust has collapsed. Societies were shattered and remain so.
Only a few weeks following the officious fact check at the debate, we now have new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The Wall Street Journal reports: “The urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.”
The report isolates the “post-George Floyd protests” because no media source wants to mention the lockdowns. It is still a taboo subject. We somehow cannot say, even now, that the worst abuses of rights in US history in terms of scale and depth were a disaster, simply because saying so implicates the whole of the media, both parties, all government agencies, academia, and all the upper reaches of the social and political order.
The problem of political division is getting alarmingly serious. It’s no longer just about competing yard signs and loud rallies. We now have regular assassination attempts, plus even an extremely strange appearance of a bounty put on a candidate’s head by an official agency.
Surveys have shown that 26 million people in the US believe that violence is fine to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. Where might people have gotten that idea? Probably from many Hollywood movies that fantasize about having killed Hitler before he accomplished his evil plus the nonstop likening of Trump to Hitler, and hence one follows from another.
Liken Trump to Hitler and that is the result you produce. Just as the lockdowns and pandemic response acted out the Hollywood production of the movie Contagion – a perfect example of life imitating art – many activists today want to play a role in a real-life version of Valkyrie.
What’s next, the real-life version of “Civil War?”
There is private violence, public violence, and many forms in between including vigilante violence. Rights violations against person and property are the desiderata of our times. This springs from the culture of our times which has been heavily informed and even defined by the deployment of state violence in service of policy goals, at a scale, scope, and depth never before seen.
There were moments following March 12, 2020, and for the next two years, when there was no way to know for sure what was allowed and what was not, who was enforcing the orders (much less why), and what would be the consequences of noncompliance. We seem to have been subject to a range of coercive edicts but no one was sure of their source or the penalties for noncompliance. We were all introduced into the real-world workings of martial-law totalitarianism, which took forms we somehow did not expect.
There is probably not a living soul without some bizarre story. I was thrown out of several stores for issues of mask compliance even though it was unclear whether there were mandates. It all depended on the day. There was one store where the proprietor was laughing about masks one day and enforcing them the next, following a threat from an angry customer that he would call the police.
Businesses that tried to reopen were closed by force. Violence was threatened against beachgoers. Churches gathered in secret. House parties were extremely risky. Later, refusing the shot meant being barred from the office, though once more it was not clear who precisely was enforcing the order and what the consequences would be for noncompliance.
When CISA – about which no one knew anything because it had been created only in 2018 – sent out its sheet about which industries were essential and which were nonessential, it was not clear precisely who would make the determination or what would happen if the judgment was wrong. Where was the enforcement arm? Sometimes it would appear – threatening visits from inspectors or checks by police – and other times not so much.
On that day, I was riding back from New York City on the Amtrak and suddenly found myself overwhelmed with the possibility that the train could be stopped and all passengers thrown into a quarantine camp. I sheepishly asked an employee about the possibility. He said “It’s possible but, in my view, unlikely.”
That’s what it was like for years ongoing. Even now the rules are unclear, and this is especially true when it comes to speech. We are merely feeling our way around a dark room. We are shocked when a vaccine-critical post stays up on Facebook. A video on YouTube that mentions censorship might stay up or be taken down. Most dissidents today have been demonetized from YouTube, which is nothing but an effort to financially ruin our best creators.
Censorship is the deployment of force in service of state power, and other institutions connected to state power, for purposes of culture planning. It is exercised by the shallow state, in response to the middle state, and on behalf of the deep state. It is a form of violence that interrupts the free flow of information: the ability to speak, and the ability to learn.
Censorship trains the population to be quiet, afraid, and constantly stressed, and it sorts people by the compliant vs the dissidents. Censorship is designed to shape the public mind toward the end of shoring up regime stability. Once it starts, there is no limit to it.
I’ve mentioned to people that Substack, Rumble, and X could be banned by the spring of next year, and people respond with incredulity. Why? Four years ago, we were locked in our homes and locked out of churches, and the schools for which people pay all year were shut down by government force. If they can do that, they can do anything.
Censorship has been so effective that it has changed the way we engage with each other even in private. Brownstone Institute just held a private retreat for scholars, fellows, and special guests. One very special guest wrote me that she was completely shocked at the freedom of thought and speech that was present in the room. As a mover in the highest circles, she had forgotten what that was like.
This censorship coincides with a strange valorization of violence that we are presented with from all over the world: Ukraine, the Middle East, London, Paris, and many American cities. Never have so many held video cameras in their pockets and never have there been so many platforms on which to post the results. One does wonder how all these relentless presentations of destruction and killing affect public culture.
What purpose are all these soft, hard, public, and private exercises of violence serving? The standard of living is suffering, lives are shortening, despair and ill-health are main features of the population, and illiteracy has swept through an entire generation. The decision to deploy violence to master the microbial kingdom did not turn out well. Worse, it unleashed violence as a way of life.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” wrote Frédéric Bastiat, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
That is precisely where we are. It’s time we talk about it and name the culprit. Liberty, privacy, and property were already unsafe before 2020 but it was the lockdowns that unleashed Pandora’s box of evils. We cannot live this way. The only arguments worth having are those that name the reason for the suffering and offer a viable path back to civilized living.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Legacy Media Outlets Buried Research Showing DEI Makes People More Likely To Agree With Hitler
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Two legacy media outlets refused to publish stories covering a study that said diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) education “increased hostility” and made people more likely to agree with the modified statements of Adolf Hitler.
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claimed The New York Times and Bloomberg informed them that they would not publish stories concerning their study, citing editorial concerns, according to communications obtained by the National Review. The study, titled “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias,” found that people who read material espousing left-wing ideas on race and identity often amplified “perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.”
“Unfortunately, both publications jumped on the story enthusiastically only for it to be inexplicably pulled at the highest editorial levels,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “This has never happened to the NCRI in its 5-year history.”
A New York Times reporter told the NCRI that they would reconsider publishing the article on the study if the paper went under peer review, according to National Review.
“The piece was reported and ready for publication, but at the eleventh hour, the New York Times insisted the research undergo peer review after discussions with editorial staff — an unprecedented demand for our work,” a NCRI researcher told National Review. “The journalist involved had previously covered far more sensitive NCRI findings, such as our QAnon and January 6th studies, without any such request.”
The New York Times denied having an article ready to publish in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Our journalists are always considering potential topics for news coverage, evaluating them for newsworthiness, and often choose not to pursue further reporting for a variety of reasons,” a Times spokesperson told the DCNF. “Speculative claims from outside parties about The Times’s editorial process are just that. It’s not true that The Times had prepared a story ‘ready for publication’ on this topic.”
The two Bloomberg reporters had a piece ready to publish, but Nabila Ahmed, the team leader for Global Equality at Bloomberg News, informed the NCRI that they wouldn’t publish the article, saying it was an “editorial decision.” Ahmed’s responsibilities are to “elevate issues of race, gender, diversity and fairness within companies, governments and societies that Bloomberg News covers,” according to her LinkedIn.
The reporters previously communicated to the NCRI that the research would create “an important story” and they would’ve been “eager” to publish on it, according to National Review.
In the experiment, researchers took 850 participants and gave one group a neutral essay on the caste system in India, and gave the other caste-sensitivity-training material from Equality Labs, a left-wing human rights organization, according to the study.
When participants who read the DEI-inspired material viewed modified past statements from Hitler which replaced the word “Jew” with “Brahmin,” the upper class in the caste system, they were more likely to agree that Brahmins were “‘parasites’ (+35.4%), ‘viruses’ (+33.8%), and ‘the devil personified’ (+27.1%),” according to the study.
The DEI-charged material seemed to “engender a hostile attribution bias and heighten racial suspicion, prejudicial attitudes, authoritarian policing, and support for punitive behaviors in the absence of evidence for a transgression deserving punishment,” according to the study.
The NCRI and Bloomberg did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Shadowy US intelligence agency accused of funding efforts to suppress conservative media
From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
A new report suggests the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is using covert methods to suppress ‘conservative media’ in the United States. The NED, essentially a CIA cutout, also recently hired pro-Ukraine former U.S. diplomat Victoria Nuland.
A new report from Redacted’s married couple Clayton and Natali Morris asks some serious questions about a CIA operation now headed by the “queen of regime change, Victoria Nuland” which they say is “censoring the news given to Americans.”
Their report touches on the long tradition of the CIA and its cutouts in funding popular culture, news, art, and entertainment as a “propaganda weapon” – which is used abroad, and at home in the West.
A shadowy agency known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has now been shown to be exempt from explaining to Congress – or to anyone – precisely what it spends its $315 million annual budget on doing.
As Natali Morris explains, you have very good reason to care what the NED is doing – with your money.
“They do these secret things – government regime change – and they don’t tell us about it. And it’s funded through the State Department,” she said.
The NED was set up under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to advance “The Democracy Program” abroad. So what’s the problem with changing regimes so they become more “democratic”?
As the New York Times reported in 1997, “The National Endowment for Democracy [was] created … to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.”
The NYT report documents dozens of overseas operations in “enemy” nations such as China and across the former Soviet Union – but also in those of allies such as Italy, Portugal, France, and Northern Ireland.
Its “Democracy Program” seeks to program democracies in the West. Declassified reported in 2022 that over six years the NED had given over £2.6 million – over $3 million – to fund “pro-democracy” outlets in the U.K. This included the “intelligence group” Bellingcat.
In May 2023, Elon Musk spoke out about the shadowy group when he “accused Bellingcat of running psychological operations against the US public.” That is because they do, as Aaron Mate explained in this piece for The GrayZone.
“In a leaked email exchange, UK media personality Paul Mason gushed over Bellingcat’s role in receiving what he called ‘a steady stream of intel from Western agencies,’ thus allowing it to provide ‘intel service input by proxy,’” he wrote.
This is one example of how an NED-funded operation can seem “independent” – and function as a mouthpiece for Deep State propaganda.
NED funding extends beyond financing war propaganda for American consumption. It also includes the international U.K.-based newswire Reuters – as Declassified pointed out.
“Another UK recipient of NED funding is the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the corporate foundation of the global news company,” the report said.
What is more, due to a change in U.S. law, the NED is now legally permitted to target Americans at home. As Declassified further explained in its 2022 report, “John Kiriakou, a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, told Declassified that recent changes in the law have widened the potential targets of US information operations.”
Kiriakou, who “served in the agency’s core Directorate of Operations,” continued, “In 2011, the US Congress changed the law that forbade the Executive Branch from [propagandizing] the American people or nationals of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries – the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.”
Changes in U.S. law have meant that regime change operations have come home.
As Clayton and Natali Morris suggest, “The cultural Cold War has never gone away. It’s just shifted from target to target.” This was the conclusion of Frances Stonor Saunders in her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. Her book “presents … the shocking evidence that the CIA infiltrated every niche of the cultural sphere during the postwar years.”
This may seem a conspiracy theory too far. Yet it is not merely demonstrated by Saunders’ abundance of proof that “some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West became instruments of the American government” during the Cold War. There is an actual blueprint for doing exactly this, and it was published by the U.S. government itself over 70 years ago.
The CIA was created in 1947. One year later its power was mobilized in a new strategy published by George Kennan. Called “Organized Political Warfare”, this was a blueprint for the use of every mode of cultural production to be mustered in the promotion and defense of liberal democracy.
What this means is much of our culture since then has been funded by the CIA – and by its cutout, the NED – and is basically Deep State propaganda.
As Saunders’ book shows, “The CIA’s front organizations and the philanthropic foundations that channeled its money also organized conferences, mounted exhibitions, arranged concerts, and flew symphony orchestras around the world.”
U.S. and Western thought leaders, artists, critics, writers, and political theorists were “willingly or unwittingly” promoted by the CIA and its cutouts – like the NED.
“Many of the period’s foremost intellectuals and artists appear in the book: [leading liberal] Isaiah Berlin, [art critic] Clement Greenberg, [proto-neocon] Sidney Hook, [writer] Arthur Koestler, [political theorist and “godfather of neoconservatism”] Irving Kristol .. .George Orwell, [“artist”] Jackson Pollock, [British atheist] Bertrand Russell, [French atheist] Jean-Paul Sartre, [regime court historian] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and [homosexualist poet] Stephen Spender, among others.”
Pollock’s awful “art,” along with that of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, has always been inexplicable from the viewpoint of beauty, craft, and meaning. That is because modern art was used as a “CIA weapon,” as “former CIA officials” admitted in this 1995 report from the U.K.’s Independent.
Saunders maintains, of course, that the manufacture of cultural propaganda did not end with the Cold War.
“The NED is the umbilical cord of gold that leads directly back to Washington,” she explained to Declassified.
“And by this I’m not only referring to official US government programs, but to the vast network of clandestine players that plan and enact its information warfare operations.”
The scandal reported by Redacted is that these covert methods, funded by U.S. taxpayers, are being used today on U.S. citizens themselves. Through its sponsorship of the Global Disinformation Index, the NED used arms-length cutouts to suppress criticism of “COVID-19” measures, labeling them and protests against abortion and alleged voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. presidential election as “misinformation.” Redacted shows evidence that “conservative media” in the U.S. generally is also being suppressed – thanks to NED-funded efforts.
What is more, the NED has secured a “sensitive” classification on its activities, and so neither has to report them to the public, nor disclose them at all.
As Natali Morris points out in her report on the NED and its covert propaganda war on Americans, “They just hired the queen of regime change, Victoria Nuland. They hired her in September – which means they’re hardly trying to hide that they’re evil.”
Nuland was formerly under-secretary of State, in a department which has oversight of both the CIA and its proxies such as the NED. She infamously appointed the regime-changed new government of Ukraine in a 2014 phone call to then U.S. Ambassador Christopher Pyatt.
She is married to arch-neocon Robert Kagan, whose brother Donald teaches at West Point, and whose sister-in-law Kimberly Kagan runs the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). The ISW, itself a common source for U.S. and U.K. war news, is, according to Responsible Statecraft, “Funded by important military contractors in America’s military industrial complex such as General Dynamics, DynCorps International, and CACI International, ISW is also a creation of the ‘Kagan industrial complex.’”
The leading agency of the CIA specializing in domestic “regime change” operations is now led by the woman who led regime change operations abroad.
The warning of Mike Benz, who worked in the last Trump State Department, also featured in Redacted’s report.
“Victoria Nuland is now at the CIA’s #1 cutout. The prime mover in the censorship industry: the NED.”
Natali Morris cited a November 18 report from Benz’s Foundation for Freedom Online which showed the NED does not publish any information on how it spends its annual $300 million federal budget.
As the report concluded, “[The NED] expects to operate in the dark and never be subject to transparency requirements ever again.”
Given its track record, its founding purpose and its current chief, Clayton and Natali Morris make a convincing case for ending the NED, hoping the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will consider doing so.
“They [the NED] are trying to censor information to the American people in order to enact regime change in places that they want. So these are just the projects we know about. What about the projects that we don’t?”
It is time the American people were told the truth, say the Morrises.
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