Two unanticipated events in 2016 completely shocked our ruling class: the election of Trump in the U.S. and the Brexit vote in the U.K. Our elites did not respond by examining the disconnect between their core assumptions and the will of the people. Instead they decided that, sure, democracy is all fine and well, but naturally, democracy must be protected from these unruly people.
After all, the people often don’t know what’s good for them. So those who know better must acquire the capacity to monitor and control the will of the people if we are to ‘defend democracy’. The means for doing this in the digital age, our ruling class divined, is by monitoring populations’ behaviors and shaping their thinking by controlling the flow of information online. The idea of censorship once again became chic.
Birth of the Censorship Leviathan
In the wake of Trump and Brexit, the Anglosphere Surveillance State, birthed following 9/11, gave birth in turn to its natural offspring, the Censorship Leviathan. There are 434 federal agencies in the Federal Register — most of which the average American cannot name. A little-known agency in our vast administrative state, called CISA — the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency — was erected in the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016. The following year CISA turned its attention from cyberattacks and foreign threats against our critical infrastructure to threats — whether foreign or domestic — against what Director Jen Easterly called our “cognitive infrastructure”. For the uninitiated, our cognitive infrastructure consists of the thoughts inside your head. These, naturally, need to be protected from bad ideas, defined as ideas the Government or its unelected officials do not like.
CISA quickly became a clearinghouse for what Michael Shellenberger has dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex: an interlocking network of federal agencies and quasi-private (i.e., mostly Government-funded) nonprofits, including some housed at universities like Stanford and the University of Washington, which do the Government’s bidding. Starting in 2017, this censorship industry — and it is an industry, complete with training programs and career opportunities for college grads — worked around the clock to flag posts or accounts the Government wanted removed. Government officials then forwarded these accounts to social media companies, pressuring the companies by wielding the big stick of Government power if they refused to comply.
The Censorship Leviathan grew massively during Covid. Along with my colleagues Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, I found myself caught in the gears of the Government’s censorship machinery for, well, threatening your cognitive infrastructure — specifically by challenging the Government’s preferred pandemic policies like lockdowns, school closures, universal masking and vaccine mandates. The three of us joined a federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, filed by the state Attorney-Generals from Missouri and Louisiana; we were later joined by two other private plaintiffs, health freedom advocate Jill Hines and journalist Jim Hoft.
Shortly after we filed this case, almost a year ago, I wrote:
This evidence [we presented to the court] suggests we are uncovering the most serious, coordinated and large-scale violation of First Amendment free speech rights by the federal Government’s executive branch in U.S. history. Period, full stop. Even wartime propaganda efforts never reached this level of censorship, nor did the Government in days past have the power of today’s social media at its disposal.
On July 4th of this year, judge Terry Doughty granted our motion for a preliminary injunction, striking the first major blow against the government’s Censorship Leviathan. (The Government appealed the injunction to the 5th Circuit and we are awaiting an expedited hearing.) In the injunction ruling, the judge echoed my claim, writing: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” Perhaps he chose to release the ruling on Independence Day to drive home the point.
New Tentacles
This is clearly a strong claim but, as I have previously argued, an entirely accurate one. Before the digital age, censorship cases typically involved the Government suppressing one publisher, one article or book, or one source. In this case, we have a Government-funded, Government-coordinated ‘misinformation’ industry responsible for censoring hundreds of thousands of Americans on social media tens of millions of times. The breadth and scope of the Censorship Leviathan’s reach is difficult to fathom and would have been impossible to achieve without the previously constructed digital infrastructure of the Surveillance State.
A few days after the injunction ruling, the House Judiciary Committee released a report detailing that the FBI had pressured social media companies to censor Americans on behalf of the Ukrainian intelligence agency (the SBU) — an agency that, according to President Zelensky, had been infiltrated by Russian collaborators. Documents obtained through congressional subpoena revealed that the FBI directed Facebook, Instagram, Google and YouTube to censor thousands of accounts on behalf of the SBU, which included an American journalist and a U.S. State Department account.
When Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, failed to take immediate action on these flagged posts, an FBI agent offered to provide a “legal process” though which the company could act. As the Committee report explained, the FBI agent “suggested concocting a legal justification to support the removal of the flagged accounts if Meta did not find that the posts and comments violated its terms of service”. In response, Meta opened a 24/7 channel to respond to the SBU’s requests.
The congressional committee’s report confirmed previous reporting from investigative journalist Lee Fang. Illia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) told Fang how their authorities defined ‘disinformation’ broadly:
When people ask me, “How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?” Indeed, it is very difficult in such an information flow. I say, “Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.” Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.
In short, Americans are now being censored not only by our own Government, but by Ukrainian intelligence agents — or possibly by Russian agents posing as Ukrainian intelligence agents. Hollywood screenwriters could make this the plotline of the next Mission Impossible movie, but it might come off as just too implausible and absurd to moviegoers. The House Committee report also noted that the Department of Justice routed censorship requests from other foreign governments, including European countries and the European Union.
The Surveillance State
During Covid, the federal Government saw fit not only to censor your voice online but to monitor your private behaviour for compliance with Government directives.
In May of 2022 we learned that during the previous two years, the CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed Covid lockdown orders. According to documents obtained by Motherboard, the CDC used phone location data to monitor schools and churches and planned to also use the data for at least 21 applications beyond Covid. These include, among other applications, monitoring curfews, neighbour-to-neighbour visits, visits to churches and other places of worship, school visits, visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses, as well as exposure to certain building types, urban areas and violence.
Although the data purchased by the CDC was aggregated to show trends, research has demonstrated that unmasking specific users from these aggregated mobility datasets is quite feasible. One research team studied 15 months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and published its results in Nature: “In a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the [mobile phone] carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal [data] points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.”
Evidence also emerged recently that the CIA has been using unauthorised digital surveillance to spy on Americans. Even the ACLU expressed alarm when newly declassified documents revealed that the CIA has been secretly conducting massive surveillance programs that capture Americans’ private information. As it noted: “This surveillance is done without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress to protect our civil liberties.” By consequence, “These reports raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans. This invasion of our privacy must stop.”
U.S. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for the declassification and investigation of relevant CIA documents. In a letter of April 13th 2021, which they made public, the two senators expressed concern that the CIA programme was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection [of data], and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — FISA] collection.” Despite Congress’s clear intent, with the support of the American people, to limit warrantless collection of Americans’ private records, the senators warn, “these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”
There is a broader legal context for these extra-legal developments of mass surveillance of civilian populations. Since the war on terror began, Western nations have legislatively scaled up their increasingly intrusive networks of mass surveillance — often referred to with the euphemism ‘bulk collection’. The last decade has seen such measures passed in the U.K., France, Australia, India, Sweden and other countries — not to mention the AI enabled facial- and gate-recognition surveillance in China, technology that President Xi Jinping is already exporting to eager rogue regimes around the globe.
The Beast and Its Offspring
Political theorist Eric Voegelin, who studied the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, noted that the common feature of all such regimes was not concentration camps, or mass surveillance, or secret police — as horrifying as all these things are. The common feature of all totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions. These regimes begin by monopolising what counts as rationality — what counts as acceptable public knowledge — and then place any dissidents outside the pale of rational conversation. Surveillance of dissident thoughts and behaviours and censorship of dissenting opinions then expand together.
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan reaches the gates of Hell on his way to tempt our first parents in Eden, he meets two grotesque monsters guarding the exit. The first monster, Sin, explains that he sprung from Satan’s own head; this monster subsequently delivered the second spectre, Death. Just as the former by necessity birthed the latter, so also the post-9/11 Surveillance State was destined to eventually birth the Censorship Leviathan. These two beasts now guard the gates of permissible public discourse. The seven-year-old Censorship Leviathan cannot be slain unless we also reign in the 20-year-old of the Surveillance State, which gave birth to it.
My job as a physician specialising in psychiatry is to help individuals regain control over their own behaviours and thoughts — to recover their interior freedom when it is impaired by disease, addiction or neurosis. As someone who specialises in treating mental disorders, I can attest: when the Government takes upon itself the task of monitoring and shaping your behaviour (through surveillance) and your thoughts (through censorship), we have a perfectly apt name for this.
It’s called mind control.
Aaron Kheriaty MD is the Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Programme at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre and a senior fellow at the Zephyr Institute. This article was first published on the American Mind.
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Demand is overwhelming the vaccination teams is it? In other news, I have a bridge to sell you.
Slow rollout due to overwhelming demand, makes perfect sense in la-la land. The vaccinators are so swarmed by teenagers screaming to get jabbed that they are unable to work, basically.
A bridge, you say? Where do I sign?
It’s almost like the propaganda was written in advance.
Demand is so overwhelming that they have had to leave early if you believe what PRAVDA are telling us
Unsuccessful may goods news, but it’s not unsuccessful enough
Headlines designed to frighten women into having the jab
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/headlines-designed-to-frighten-women-into-having-the-jab/
Wokingham Stand in the Park
Make friends – keep sane – talk freedom and have a laugh
Howard Palmer Gardens RG40 2HD Sundays 10am
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
Has the bridge been fully vaccinated?
Of course. Plus 6 boosters. It’s also triple masked and sanitised every 5 seconds via a special inbuilt QuikSan (TM) system that can also be upgraded to decontaminate bridge users QuikSanPlebs (TM). There is a red green traffic light system to limit users to one at a time, and 30 second spaced loudspeaker announcements to “stay safe”. It’s really quite state of the art.
“Professor Kevin McConway, an Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics at the Open University, said the latest [Covid test] results in secondary school-age children were “concerning”. “However you look at it, this is a huge increase, and it clearly follows from schools having reopened and, crucially, from vaccination rates of children in that age group still being low,” he said.”
What a wanker. This is gratuitous fear-mongering for attention seeking purposes of the worst kind. He has no stake in this. Pure evil.
Old fart feeling no longer important, craving the bygone days when people had to listen to him.
interestingly….
Over 5,200 doctors and scientists have recently signed a declaration stating that Covid policies may constitute ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ https://lc.org/newsroom/details/092821-thousands-of-medical-professionals-declare-covid-policies-crimes-against-humanity
As the European Parliament resumed on Monday 13 September 2021, their first order of business was a debate over health and disease prevention. A letter of Notice of Liability for harm and death from COVID-19 vaccines was served on all members of the European Parliament and sent to the Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency by a large international group of hundreds of doctors. The notice was accompanied by a summary of the latest scientific evidence regarding vaccine-immune interactions, and a letter from Holocaust survivors demanding a halt to the vaccination program and an end to unlawful medical coercion. The notice included this: ‘The rush to vaccinate first and research later has left you in a position whereby COVID-19 vaccination policy is now entirely divorced from the relevant evidence-base.’ The notice alleges gross negligence in the authorisation process, support of crimes against humanity and for actively or tacitly paving the way to the second holocaust of mankind. It ends with ‘The gravity of your deeds is now laid out before the world. For the sake of yourselves and your families, rise and respond. Or go down in the history books in indelible shame and disgrace’. You can read it here, together with the fully referenced scientific support: https://doctors4covidethics.org/as/
all from the new bible of vaccine safety…
https://www.independentinformation.co.uk/resources/articles/covid-vaccines-safe-effective
ignore this, thought it was deleted
As the European Parliament resumed on Monday 13 September 2021, their first order of business was a debate over health and disease prevention. A letter of Notice of Liability for harm and death from COVID-19 vaccines was served on all members of the European Parliament and sent to the Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency by a large international group of hundreds of doctors. The notice was accompanied by a summary of the latest scientific evidence regarding vaccine-immune interactions, and a letter from Holocaust survivors demanding a halt to the vaccination program and an end to unlawful medical coercion. The notice included this: ‘The rush to vaccinate first and research later has left you in a position whereby COVID-19 vaccination policy is now entirely divorced from the relevant evidence-base.’ The notice alleges gross negligence in the authorisation process, support of crimes against humanity and for actively or tacitly paving the way to the second holocaust of mankind. It ends with ‘The gravity of your deeds is now laid out before the world. For the sake of yourselves and your families, rise and respond. Or go down in the history books in indelible shame and disgrace’. You can read it here, together with the fully referenced scientific support: https://doctors4covidethics.org/as/
from the new bible of vaccine sefety…
https://www.independentinformation.co.uk/resources/articles/covid-vaccines-safe-effective
Many eminent highly knowledgeable and respected doctors and scientists, most of whom are proponents of vaccines (and indeed initially recommended the Covid injections), two of whom are well known vaccine developers, and two Nobel Prize winners have been calling for the Covid shots to be halted immediately on safety grounds. These views are not being aired via UK mainstream media (MSM) or major platforms such as Facebook and YouTube and are, instead, actively suppressed. Over 5,200 doctors and scientists have recently signed a declaration stating that Covid policies may constitute ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ https://lc.org/newsroom/details/092821-thousands-of-medical-professionals-declare-covid-policies-crimes-against-humanity
from the new bible of vaccine safety…
https://www.independentinformation.co.uk/resources/articles/covid-vaccines-safe-effective
This is wholly without precedent in the UK. ONS data shows that there has been a 47% rise in all cause deaths amongst teenagers aged 15-19 since vaccination of this age group commenced, compared with the same period in 2020, the rise also coinciding precisely with the start of vaccination. The rise in deaths for teenage boys is 63%.
from the new bible of vaccine safety…
https://www.independentinformation.co.uk/resources/articles/covid-vaccines-safe-effective
This claim you are uncritically promoting is unsourced (to the original data), unexplained, and on checking appears to be very likely false and definitely misleading.
See here for more detailled explanation:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/18/child-vaccination-rates-as-low-as-3-5-in-areas-of-england/#comment-612166
And apparently ignorant. Has no idea that the jabs don’t stop infection or transmission.
Why does LS print this stuff? It doesn’t have to. It could report its own version of these stories.
Exactly. And why is The Guardian quoting the opinion of a ‘Professor of Applied Statistics’?!
The Guardian (along with much of the rest of the MSM) will quote anyone who says something which supports the agenda!
Emeritus = retired
Why should the latest COVID test result in school age children be ‘concerning’, Mr ‘Expert’ McConway?
Those at clinically risk have already been vaccinated, and possibly already had a booster, and the rest -aside from perhaps a handful (literally) are not as risk of serious illness or death from COVID, but they, especially boys, ARE at risk from life-altering or threatening complications FROM the jab – significantly higher.
Are they implying that the young are to be used as guinea pig ‘human shields’ for older/more clinically vulnerable but who are both already fully jabbed and where the different in rates of infecting others is minimal between those jabbed and thos not.
He IMHO apparently isn’t much of an expert. Maybe he could find some beans to count when – like many of his fellow ‘expert professionals’ – aren’t taking time out from their day jobs to grandstand in the media to gain notariety and hopefully £££ in ‘grants’ to boost their income. To me, they are now mostly no better than bumb-a$$ ac-tor luvvies.
Dec 2020 … the headlines were 15m jabs to freedom – once the most vulnerable groups were vaccinated we can go back to normal again.
Well , ten months later not only have the vulnerable been double and triple jabbed but also most of the healthy adult population have now been double jabbed too and now they’re finally coming for your kids aged 12-15 years old.
Once 12-15 year olds have been jabbed you know whats coming next don’t you?
This will not end until we say it does.
Because you can’t start a social credit system with only 15m jabbed. Just like a drug dealer, if you get them young, they’re hooked for life and by hooked, I mean, in the system, otherwise, you’re going to ned another pandemic at some point to coerce people again to get jabbed and bring in vax passes, which won’t be so easy (though, we seem to have country full of fuckwits so who knows).
Fuck me – that needed some full stops and sentences (and the edit button disappeared before I could).
I like the way your ideas came out in that post. No punctuation necessary. That’s how we think after all.
https://medium.com/id2020/immunization-an-entry-point-for-digital-identity-ea37d9c3b77e. Very scary.
At least they’re “kind” enough to tell us their plans in advance. People can’t say, “I didn’t see this coming”.
Going to have to get jabbed to go abroad. Can anyone recommend which vaccine has least possible side effects please?
I’d recommend the TB jab. Nasty scab, granted, but no sign of blood clots or myocarditis or Guillan-Barre disease afterwards. And, importantly, no sign of tuberculosis either.
Very amusing!
Tetanus is pretty good too, if you hang around dogs a lot. Typhoid is ok, especially the new one, the old one used to make you feel a bit crook for a day or too.
And then of course if you want an actual vaccine passport that shows you are no threat to public health, there’s the yellow fever one.
You beat me to it.
I’m not going overseas until this clownshow is over.
Mask? No thank you
Hand sanitiser? No thank you
‘Vaccine’? Fuck right off
And the tests are all on 2 yr EAs only. With a bit of luck/spine at the authorities, that particular farce and impediment might have run its course by next Spring.
Go to the Government’s online Yellow Card Scheme….and see for yourself.
I didn’t think there were any countries that insisted on a jab. The US maybe, Malta?
Antigua does
You don’t HAVE to.
The one containing a placebo.
Resist! That’s what I’m doing.
Nope – for the simple reason such miracles exist only in the imagination.
And in the considerable armoury of big pharma!
To self.
Forgot about tetanus.
One cannot really get herd immunity re this because it, err kills very efficiently. Thus no opportunity of ever achieving herd immunity.
Doesn’t matter which one.
They all damage bodies in some or other way and can’t be detoxed from the system. The short, medium and long term effects are unknown – the covid ‘vaccine’ trials only conclude in 2023
There’s so much wrong in that sentence it’s hard to know where to start.
Yes to all your points. The only way his statement makes any sense is if we are aiming for zero covid! It seems we can’t shake off the zero covid folks.
‘False positives’? Every single PCR test is false, positive or negative. It cannot detect infectious SARS-COV-2 at all.
There’s – in fact – nothing to suggest that there is a rise in cases. There’s a rise in detected infections due to twice weekly forced testing of pupils attending school. But these pupils weren’t all in hibernation in bunkers on the other side of the moon or something like that prior to schools reopening. They were freely mixing with their peers and the general population in their spare time, presumably more so, as they weren’t isolated among themselves in classrooms.
The quoted statement is based on the implied assumption that society was in transmission-preventing lockdown before schools reopened after the summer holidays but it wasn’t.
I thought there was unprecedented demand?
Oh but supply can’t meet demand it’s so unprecedented!!!!
Walk right in, little girl, and be injected with a useless, potentially dangerous, experimental drug. Don’t bother to ask mummy first.
But don’t take a Teaco’s cold cure tablet unless mummy says it’s safe.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/covid-vaccine-valnev-astrazeneca-oxford-b1940170.html
Valneva jab that U.K. ditched has stronger immune response than the Astra Zeneca jab.
Typical. Like you, I could have been persuaded to have that one to get the stasi off my back.
Yellow Card Reporting Data as of 6th Oct 2021
1719 extremely rare adverse reactions.
If this chart is any guide, the teenager vaccines and the boosters for the “most vulnerable” haven’t resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of daily vaccinations…
This article turns my stomach. I hope Guardian employees (and other Trusted News Initiative collaborators) understand that they will be held accountable for the harm caused by their propaganda and encouragement of the population – including children – to have these bioweapons injected into them. I’m convinced the adverse effect levee will burst, at which point millions of angry people will turn on the propagandists, looking in particular at where their funding comes from.
From 10 December 2020:
https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative-vaccine-disinformation
Less than a year later, and vaccines are indeed linked to “freedom and individual liberties”.
So it wasn’t disinformation was it, BBC? It was what we citizen journalists like to call “news” or even “investigative journalism”. You know, the sort of thing BBC Panorama used to do in the old days.
The criminality is so flagrant. Who the hell are these people? What have they been told? And do they really want to live in the world they’ve helped create? I look forward to their criminal trials.
We, the general,public, haven’t been able to see a GP for well over a year, but now clinics are going to be opened so teens who do not want this vaxx have easier access. Meanwhile the number of people dying due to lack of access to doctors, hospital medical procedures and operations, continues to rise.
Why do I have this vision of miscreants in dirty raincoats standing outside the injection centres, extending their arms, unfurling and pointing a finger, beckoning to the young and inviting them in with the words ‘Come with me, I have something for you…’
Shiver…
perhaps the worst vision is that of a smiling nurse or doctor stood outside the injection centre, inviting the young into the lair…
We’re looking at something like the classic ‘hype graph’ (look up the term). Nothing to do with real public health, but attempts to sell junk to large numbers of potential customers..