The Devastating Practical Impact of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Death of the Democratic Process

The state of the information sphere today is alarming. I have written about how Google has made the ultimately fatal mistake of mistaking Authority for Authoritative. Google is only one part of the information sphere.

Historically of course, information dissemination in the modern age (say 500 years) started with books, newspapers, pamphlets and private and public meetings, including people speaking in public spaces. In the 20th Century new forms included Radio, then broadcast and then cable Television. So there was already a fairly rich information sphere prior to the introduction of the internet in the late 1990s or 25 years ago.

During those times, channels were fairly limited and the forms of communication with any kind of reach were mostly highly curated. The introduction of Cable television allowed the flourishing of some less curated content. But the internet, with the ability of anyone to publish anything at any time, and then the evolution of search engines like Google and Social Media like Facebook and its stable of sites and Twitter, allowed an unlimited number of channels with a full spectrum of curation.

The problem of uncurated channels of information is that one has to be very aware that much of what is spread is not vetted or confirmed according to the methods of traditional journalism. Is there a great deal of mis, dis and malinformation? There certainly is. And each person has to use their own power of critical thinking to discern what is "true" or what conveys valuable information from the torrent of total nonsense. For many people this is a lot of work for which they have neither the time nor inclination. As a result many continue to rely on traditional corporate media for information gathering or they now mostly get their news from search or social media.

The problem we now have is that traditional corporate media has been almost completely captured by the State or powerful private interests like Big Pharma. For instance almost all corporate television (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox) gets something like 60-70% of their revenue from Pharma. As a result you do not see any investigative journalism about pharma any longer as we used to see years ago. They cannot endanger their primary source of revenue. On things like the Ukraine Conflict, all of the corporate media simply reads whatever narrative is handed to them by the CIA, DNI, State Department, Pentagon or White House. If you rely on corporate media you have NO IDEA what is actually going on.

I would guess that something approaching 90% of what you see and hear on Corporate Media now is either an outright lie or mischaracterization. One can argue about what that number is. But the point is it is very very high. One only need to recall the complete nonsense they spewed during COVID or the nonsense they spew about the Ukraine conflict to see this.

Even my father, who has an incredibly powerful and educated mind (Valedictorian at our high powered secondary school, Yale, General Counsel of a Fortune 50 company) allows his views to be tainted by what he sees. He is old and still consumes traditional corporate media.

One of his kind of aphoristic sayings about the need for government and the need for Journalism to monitor it has always struck me.

It goes like this. Men are not angels. So we must have government. For Government to be effective it must have power. Power corrupts. So you must have news organizations and journalists to question that power and report on it.

But what happens when journalism, as I contend today, has been nearly completely suborned by those who wield the power?

To me this is elucidated by WHY we need to have journalism to speak truth to power.

The greatest constraint on the abuse of power is an informed populace. An informed populace is also simply important for setting the course of society in general.

But if all media, search and social media is either lying outright, or more importantly, as spelled out my Mike Benz in his interview with Tucker Carlson, which I view as one of the most important interviews in US history, they simply blackout anything that they deem contrary to the official narrative, then ALL of the people who rely on these outlets for news either have the wrong information, or they are simply COMPLETELY uninformed about anything that matters or that would allow them to become well-informed.

Curation has a value if it can be mostly trusted. But the lesson of the COVID and Ukraine war period is that Corporate Media curation, Google/Youtube curation, Facebook curation, cannot be trusted. At all. The value of the current curation and the current media landscape is essentially indistiguishable from zero. This is why trust and confidence in media is at an all time low.

As a result I watch zero corporate media and I do not use Google or Facebook. I do not have time to waste on signal to noise ratio news approaching the zero limit. I now get ALL of my news from websites and videos, most of which are sadly still on Youtube, which is one of the most evil fora online. This uncurated news flow of course means I have to expend a lot of mental energy to do the curation myself, using my own powers of critical thinking. I realize most people do not have the time to do that.

And of course I would not even consider reading any of the complete CIA directed or State Department dreck spewed forth by the New York Times or Washington Post, except to see what the official narrative is at any given time.

Google/Youtube destroys speech by tweaking their algorithms to prevent what they deem objectionable from being recommended or they delete it altogether (anything that does not agree with the WHO, the White House or Big Pharma on COVID or the State Department/DNI/Intel State Blob on things like Ukraine or Israel). Facebook also does. Twitter used to but after Musk bought it some actual information gets through.

So where does that leave us as a society?

The dangerous and practical result is that we DO NOT HAVE an informed populace. That means that any constraint on power that might exist if people WERE properly informed is lost. Power is then free to run rampant and out of control as I assert they are doing right now.

I watched a Tom Bilyeu interview with Bret Weinstein the day after I wrote this article. At about minute 50:30 Weinstein says: “You can wreck democracy by wrecking speech, even if people are perfectly free to vote for whatever they want”…”You don’t need to game the election if the public mind is confused by being starved of actual information”.

Let us assume that we still have a functioning electoral system where people vote. The idea of a MANDATE is now completely erroneous. If people have no idea about the full range of information on any given issue, like Climate Change, where Media, Facebook and Google/Youtube demonetize and bury results as a matter of policy, then any vote on such issues is meaningless. There IS no mandate or even electoral outcome because people are so woefully uninformed about the arguments and facts, largely because anything contrary to the IPCC is buried. And that is just one of many many issues on which the blackouts and lies prevent people from being usefully informed.

I just thought of another problem the lack of free and open public debate and thus an uninformed populace rendering voting meaningless poses. If the defects of our permanent elite ruling class and their actions can not be improved through voting and Democratic processes, that means that violent and undemocratic solutions to the problems become more probable.

But more generally, the ideal norm for a Democratic polity is that you have an informed populace, that populace votes for its representatives, you have faith in the mechanical verity of the vote, and everyone accepts the results. If either the mechanics are compromised, which is another issue, or the populace is uninformed, then you cannot have ANY faith in the election itself, and hence you cannot accept the results as valid. That is the practical end of Democracy. And that is where we have arrived.

There is a case currently in front of the Supreme Court brought by Missouri and Louisiana challenging this Censorship Industrial Complex. At oral argument it appeared the Justices just had NO IDEA that there was even a problem. Matt Taibbi and Mike Shellenberger have documented much of the problems from the Twitter Files to the US Government having constructed an entire edifice of control, much of it using third parties to circumvent 1st Amendment problems. My fear is the SCOTUS will fail to rein in this complex. If they do fail, the prospects for an actual functioning Democracy, which DEPENDS on an informed populace are doomed and we will be entering a period of complete decay of our Constitutional Democratic Republic because the ultimate constraint on the abuse of power is gone for good and our society has become completely perverted and warped by the absence of robust public debate on most of the issues that matter.