BY Glenn Greewald

 

 

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by "liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party). 

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of "hate speech” to mean "views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech." Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful. 

When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard.

The data proving a deeply radical authoritarian strain in Trump-era Democratic Party politics is ample and have been extensively reported here. Democrats overwhelmingly trust and love the FBI and CIA. Polls show they overwhelmingly favor censorship of the internet not only by Big Tech oligarchs but also by the state. Leading Democratic Party politicians have repeatedly subpoenaed social media executives and explicitly threatened them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they do not censor more aggressively — a likely violation of the First Amendment given decades of case law ruling that state officials are barred from coercing private actors to censor for them, in ways the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly. 

Democratic officials have used the pretexts of COVID, “the insurrection," and Russia to justify their censorship demands. Both Joe Biden and his Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, have "urged” Silicon Valley to censor more when asked about Joe Rogan and others who air what they call “disinformation” about COVID. They cheered the use of pro-prosecutor tacticsagainst Michael Flynn and other Russiagate targets; made a hero out of the Capitol Hill Police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Ashli Babbitt; voted for an additional $2 billion to expand the functions of the Capitol Police; have demanded and obtained lengthy prison sentences and solitary confinement even for non-violent 1/6 defendants; and even seek to import the War on Terror onto domestic soil.

Given the climate prevailing in the American liberal faction, this authoritarianism is anything but surprising. For those who convince themselves that they are not battling mere political opponents with a different ideology but a fascist movement led by a Hitler-like figure bent on imposing totalitarianism — a core, defining belief of modern-day Democratic Party politics — it is virtually inevitable that they will embrace authoritarianism. When a political movement is subsumed by fear — the Orange Hitler will put you in camps and end democracy if he wins again — then it is not only expected but even rational to embrace authoritarian tactics including censorship to stave off this existential threat. Fear always breeds authoritarianism, which is why manipulating and stimulating that human instinct is the favorite tactic of political demagogues.

And when it comes to authoritarian tactics, censorship has become the liberals’ North Star. Every week brings news of a newly banished heretic. Liberals cheered the news last week that Google's YouTube permanently banned the extremely popular video channel of conservative commentator Dan Bongino. His permanent ban was imposed for the crime of announcing that, moving forward, he would post all of his videos exclusively on the free speech video platform Rumble after he received a seven-day suspension from Google's overlords for spreading supposed COVID “disinformation.” What was Bongino's prohibited view that prompted that suspension? He claimed cloth masks do not work to stop the spread of COVID, a view sharedby numerous experts and, at least in part, by the CDC. When Bongino disobeyed the seven-day suspension by using an alternative YouTube channel to announce his move to Rumble, liberals cheered Google's permanent ban because the only thing liberals hate more than platforms that allow diverse views are people failing to obey rules imposed by corporate authorities.

It is not hyperbole to observe that there is now a concerted war on any platforms devoted to free discourse and which refuse to capitulate to the demands of Democratic politicians and liberal activists to censor. The spear of the attack are corporate media outlets, who demonize and try to render radioactive any platforms that allow free speech to flourish. When Rumble announced that a group of free speech advocates — including myself, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, comedian Bridget Phetasy, former Sanders campaign videographer Matt Orfalea and journalist Zaid Jilani — would produce video content for Rumble, The Washington Post immediately published a hit piece, relying exclusively on a Google-and-Facebook-aligned so-called "disinformation expert” to malign Rumble as "one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world” and a place “where conspiracies thrive," all caused by Rumble's "allowing such videos to remain on the site unmoderated.” (The narrative about Rumble is particularly bizarre since its Canadian founder and still-CEO, Chris Pavlovski created Rumble in 2013 with apolitical goals — to allow small content creators abandoned by YouTube to monetize their content — and is very far from an adherent to right-wing ideology).

The same attack was launched, and is still underway, against Substack, also for the crime of refusing to ban writers deemed by liberal corporate outlets and activists to be hateful and/or fonts of disinformation. After the first wave of liberal attacks on Substack failed — that script was that it is a place for anti-trans animus and harassment — The Post returned this week for round two, with a paint-by-numbers hit piece virtually identical to the one it published last year about Rumble. “Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates,” blared the sub-headline. “Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as [Joseph] Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube,” warned the Post. It is, evidently, extremely dangerous to society for voices to still be heard once Google decrees they should not be. 

This Post attack on Substack predictably provoked expressions of Serious Concern from good and responsible liberals. That included Chelsea Clinton, who lamented that Substack is profiting off a “grift.” Apparently, this political heiress — who is one of the world's richest individuals by virtue of winning the birth lottery of being born to rich and powerful parents, who in turn enriched themselves by cashing in on their political influence in exchange for $750,000 paychecks from Goldman Sachs for 45-minute speeches, and who herself somehow was showered with a $600,000 annual contract from NBC News despite no qualifications — believes she is in a position to accuse others of "grifting.” She also appears to believe that — despite welcoming convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to her wedding to a hedge fund oligarch whose father was expelled from Congress after his conviction on thirty-one counts of felony fraud — she is entitled to decree who should and should not be allowed to have a writing platform...

 

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FROM The South China Morning Post

 

Endless negative news stories and opinion pieces about how bad China is in almost every way are bound to shape public perception.

 

Almost nine in 10 Americans (89 per cent) consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner, according to the authoritative Pew Research.

Commenting, Winston Lord, a US ambassador to China in the 1980s, said Beijing only had itself to blame.

“The shift is caused by China’s actions under Xi [Jinping], the repression at home, the more aggressive approach abroad and intrusions in societies, including our own,” Lord said. “It has turned off not only Americans, but also Europeans and Australians.”

Lord was once one of Henry Kissinger’s bright young proteges. There is no dispute that he understands China-US relations better than most. He may have half a point. But there is also the other half, which is that if you are bombarded with negative stories about a country, day in and day out, year after year, to an absurd degree by the mainstream media, you too would think that country is just about the worst on Earth.

I was inspired to write this column by an alternative take, “How the threat of China was made in the USA”, from AJ+, a web channel of Al-Jazeera, which helps explain why the perception – “China is bad, period!” – is so widespread. Just consider some of the endless headlines cited in the news clip. They amount to subgenres of China news and analysis, with their own templates and preset assumptions and narratives; you just need to slot in different names for people and countries, time periods and numerical figures. Seemingly inexhaustible, they come out in mind-numbing regularity and rapidity, in this era of 24-hour non-stop news cycles. The following is just a tiny sample.

The Chinese government is bad

“Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History”, The New York Times, November 15, 2021

“China tries to tamp down controversy surrounding tennis star Peng Shuai”, US National Public Radio (NPR), November 22, 2021

“Covid-Era Controls May Outlast the Virus”, The New York Times, January 30, 2022

Chinese culture is bad

“China zoo ‘tries to pass dog off as wolf’”, BBC, March 5, 2021

“Why gendercide is the real ‘war on women’”, CNN, November 14, 2014

“China’s toxic work culture results in deaths and suicide”, Forbes, January 12, 2021

Chinese culinary practices are bad

“One Reason for Rising Food Prices? Chinese Hoarding”, Bloomberg, January 5, 2022

“China’s Monster Fishing Fleet: Though not alone in its destructive practices, Beijing’s rapacious fleet causes humanitarian disasters and has a unique military mission”, Foreign Policy, November 30, 2020

“Why Chinese food safety is so bad”, CNN, January 16, 2015

Chinese tech is bad

“Why China can’t innovate”, Harvard Business Review, March 2014

“Is TikTok Spying on You for China?”, Forbes, July 25, 2020

“The world’s largest surveillance system is growing – and so is the backlash”, Fortune, November 3, 2020

“How the Clean Network Changed the Future of Global Technology Competition: A US State Department initiative changed the competitive landscape for 5G”, Harvard Business Review, October 5, 2021

Chinese handling of Covid-19 was and is still bad

“The Chinese Government’s Cover-Up Killed Health Care Workers Worldwide”, Foreign Policy, March 18, 2021

“Omicron variant threatens to be Xi Jinping’s undoing”, Nikkei Asia, February 2, 2022

“Thousands of lives lost due to China’s Covid cover-up: US Republican report”, The Times of India, August 2, 2021

“China Covid-19: How state media and censorship took on coronavirus”, BBC, December 29, 2020

“Beijing is intentionally under-reporting China’s Covid death rate”, Forbes, January 2, 2022

China is bad on human rights

“The IOC and sponsors of the Beijing Games are complicit in China’s human rights abuses”, The Washington Post, January 31, 2022

“China’s genocide against the Uyghurs, in 4 disturbing charts, Vox, March 10, 2021

“China breaching every article in genocide convention, says legal report on Uyghurs”, The Guardian, March 10, 2021

Chinese support for ‘rogue states’ such as Iran, Russia and North Korea is bad

“China has to be put in the category of a ‘rogue state’”, Deutsche Welle (DW), January 22, 2019

“China and the ‘Rogues’: How China Deals with Pariah States”, The Diplomat, June 30, 2017

“How Russia and China Undermine Democracy”, Foreign Affairs, October 2, 2018

China is bad for Africa and developing nations

“China: Is it burdening poor countries with unsustainable debt?” BBC, January 6, 2022

“India subtly warns nations of China’s debt trap diplomacy”, Deccan Herald, July 31, 2020

China is bad for American jobs and manufacturing

“China trade deficit has cost the US 3.7 million jobs this century”, CNBC, January 30, 2020

“Trump vows to end China’s job ‘theft’”, BBC, February 6, 2019

“China really is to blame for millions of lost US manufacturing jobs”, MarketWatch, May 14, 2018

“How America’s biggest companies made China great again”, Newsweek, June 24, 2019

“1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?”, Wired, February. 28, 2011

China is bad for threatening Taiwan

“Beijing’s Attempts to Intimidate Taiwan Have Backfired”, Foreign Policy, July 30, 2021

“Why Is China Bullying Taiwan?”, The Diplomat, August 3, 2018

China is bad for cracking down in Hong Kong

“A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong. Neighbours are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty”, The New York Times, June 29, 2021

“The leader who killed her city: Carrie Lam has been a unique failure. Yet she is merely a symptom of Hong Kong’s ills”, The Atlantic, June 18, 2020

“How China’s Rise Has Forced Hong Kong’s Decline”, The New York Review of Books, November 26, 2019

China is bad for regional peace in Asia

“Top US admiral warns about China threat at Halifax forum in Canada”, Associated Press, November 21, 2021

“China’s bullying of Australia is bound to backfire”, Nikkei Asia, November 5, 2020

“China is the ‘principal military and economic threat’ in Asia”, CNBC, December 8, 2020

China is bad for democracy and freedom

“The World Is Fed Up with China’s Belligerence”, The Atlantic, November 9, 2021

“China’s Ambitions: Beijing’s campaign to destroy a fiercely pro-democracy newspaper suggests the playbook that it will use against other open societies”, The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2022

“China Wants to Rule the World by Controlling the Rules”, The Atlantic, December 9, 2021

“China wants to reshape the global order”, Axios, January 19, 2018

You be the judge

In short, China is bad for the world, in almost every possible way. It seems President Xi Jinping and his henchmen spend all their waking hours thinking of new ways to oppress and brainwash the Chinese people, exterminate ethnic minorities, destabilise poor nations, subvert Western democracies and plot world conquest.

In 2020, the media organisation Declassified UK released a statistical study of the reliance on unnamed intelligence or government sources by the British news media. It concluded that they routinely helped to demonise states identified by the British government as enemies, while whitewashing those considered as allies.

But the Brits pale in comparison with Americans. Upon retirement, many of the most senior officials from the US intelligence, counterterrorism and domestic law enforcement agencies end up being paid commentators and pundits for big US media corporations. For a list of their names and career paths, see my column, “Why do so many US intelligence chiefs become media pundits?” on June 24, 2021.

Imagine how it might look if a large number of retired Chinese intelligence and security chiefs ended up writing for China’s news media. Maybe Xi really is the real-life Dr Evil. More likely, though, the mainstream Western media basically follows their governments’ foreign policy priorities and goals.

 

This article was first published by the South China Morning Post

 

 

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Elon Musk gives views on ‘traditional’ mediaThe Tesla CEO called traditional news outlets ‘a relentless hatestream’ 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, known for his prolific tweeting, questioned his 73 million followers about why “traditional” media outlets operate as a “relentless hatestream” before then engaging in discussions with his followers on the topic.

“Why is the “traditional” media such a relentless hatestream? Real question,” Musk tweeted on Monday.

This post was quickly followed by another, clarifying the billionaire’s position.

“Most news outlets attempt to answer the question: ‘What are the worst things happening on Earth today?’ It’s a big planet! Obviously, some bad things are happening somewhere at any given time, but focusing relentlessly on those does not give an accurate picture of reality,” he wrote.

 

Why is the “traditional” media such a relentless hatestream? Real question.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2022

 

Musk then engaged in debate with followers, disagreeing with one view that “negative news sells better,” pointing to some popular “citizen podcasts” which “aren’t negative.”

“Maybe part of why traditional media outlets are so negative is because old habits die hard? They so rarely even try to be positive,” Musk added, sharing his frustration over the constant flow of the “news that makes one sad & angry.” 

 

The degree of Musk’s apparent disdain for traditional news media became known when he agreed with another commenter who said the target audience of most media was “the amygdala of the bottom 50% of humanity.”

“Sadly true,” the carmaker’s chief executive wrote.

Musk has a long history of controversial tweets, some even resulting in lawsuits. The entrepreneur has been widely criticized, among other things, for his skeptical comments on the Covid pandemic and on perspectives of artificial intelligence.

Tesla recently ended up in court over one of Musk’s tweets, which seemingly threatened factory workers that they would lose stock options if they unionized.

 

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BY Morgan Artyukhina

 

Western media has foamed at the mouth over the growing friendship between Russia and China, portraying the two states as enemies of democracy. This follows the US state’s definition of the nations as “malign actors” against whose rise Washington must strategically focus itself.

 

 

The latest article from the New York Times, by writer David Leonhardt, is provocatively titled “A New Axis.” Leonhardt frets that the recent joint statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping is aimed at the United States and quotes worryingly that they predict a “redistribution of power in the world” away from the US and Western Europe and toward multipolarity.

He also quotes several other similarly demonizing articles, quoting the Washington Post’s Editorial Board in saying Moscow and Beijing seek to “make the world safe for dictatorship,” and another NYT piece from a previous round of hysterical fear mongering in March 2021 that referred to the two states as an “alliance of autocracies.”

Leonhardt’s proof of Putin’s and Xi’s odious plans for world domination include China’s “zero covid” policy that has limited the country to just 4,600 pandemic deaths; that they refuse to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations; and that perennial marker of a nefarious villain: they criticize the United States!

 

One has to imagine that if China or Russia had allowed 900,000 people to die preventable deaths and readily intervened in foreign countries around the globe to advance its own agenda and force nations to abide by their values and practices, no US paper would be any less condemnatory. However, it’s the United States who does those things, so the best opposition a paper like the Times can muster is to quibble about the methods by which Washington does so.

 

In reality, Russia and China have never referred to their relationship as an alliance, as they both oppose the formation of exclusive political blocs. Instead, the two nations cooperate as it suits them, and due to years of tireless US pressuring of them and of other states to become increasingly hostile toward them, that cooperation has become increasingly close.

 

 

In late 2017 and early 2018, the Trump administration outlined in a series of strategy documents how the US’ global strategy had to shift away from the War on Terror, which targeted anti-Western non-state actors and nations that allegedly supported them, and toward “great power competition” with Russia and China. The Biden administration has reaffirmed its commitment to former US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda.

 

According to the US, Russia and China seek to upend the “rules-based international order,” a euphemism for the US-Europe-centered political, diplomatic, and economic world system that emerged after the Second World War and solidified in the 1990s, as the US became the world’s hegemonic power after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. In this world, the US calls the shots, and things that are good for the US are good for “democracy,” and things that are bad for the US are “authoritarian.”

 

This is how Leonhardt’s article can deride US allies Turkey and Hungary as part of the Moscow-Beijing “alliance of autocracies,” but lament the fact that the actually-autocratic Saudi monarchy, a US ally, attended the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

 

US Legacy of Aiding Fascists

The journalist’s comparison is itself telling: the original Axis powers, an alliance of fascist nations that rose to power in the 1930s after crushing some of Europe’s most powerful socialist and communist movements, formalized its friendship in the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact. At the time, the only nation-state that was part of the Comintern, or Communist International, was the Soviet Union, but the alliance was also against socialist and communist movements, including those in Japan, Germany, Italy, and other signatories such as Finland and Romania, and the Red Army in China that fought the Japanese invasion and founded the People’s Republic of China in the years after the war.

 

The two countries that bore the brunt of that war, and of the genocides that followed, were China and the Soviet Union, the latter of which had Russia as its largest union republic. Roughly 20 million Chinese were killed by the Japanese invasion and occupation, and the all-out assault on the USSR by Germany and her European allies killed 27 million in the Soviet Union, 15 million of whom were from Russia.

 

The US played a major role in helping Germany in particular to prepare for the war, with American industrialists in DuPont, IBM, Ford, and many other companies investing heavily in the German arms industry and in the central industries that helped them perpetrate the Holocaust. In the final phase of the war, the US “Gladio” program reached out to fascist groups across Western Europe and established a series of secretive “stay-behind” forces who would take up sabotage and irregular warfare against any future socialist or communist government.

 

Moreover, in crafting his racial policies that led to the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, Roma, Slavs and others, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler looked to the United States’ system of Jim Crow racial apartheid and its Native American Reservations for inspiration. Today, a powerful right-wing movement in the US seeks to ban teaching about that era in schools, labeling the practice “critical race theory” and demanding that a positive version that smooths over its brutalities be taught. Naturally, that effort has led to “both sides” teaching suggestions about lessons on the Nazi Holocaust, too.

 

In 1949, when the Western states allowed an independent West Germany to form and then to join the new NATO alliance against the Soviet-aligned socialist states, many former officers in Hitler’s army were allowed to join the West German government and even serve in NATO. The most infamous was Adolf Heusinger: after serving as the Operations Chief for the German Army General Staff from 1938 until 1944 and briefly becoming acting chief of the general staff, he then went on to become a military adviser to Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, and then head of West German military from 1957 to 1961 and chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961 until 1964.

 

It’s notable that even now, the US remains one of just two United Nations member states to vote against a draft resolution in November 2021 on combating glorification of Nazism and neo-Nazism - the other was Ukraine.

#Lukashevich: Every year Russia and a number of other countries initiate the adoption of the UN GA resolution against glorification of Nazism. The number of its cosponsors is steadily growing. Only two countries, year after year, vote "against" under far-fetched pretexts pic.twitter.com/0GIDsQY7Vq

— Russian Mission OSCE (@RF_OSCE) January 27, 2022

 

NYT Gushed Praise on Hitler’s Rise

The New York Times also spent decades publishing positive portrayals of Hitler and his government, beginning in 1924, when Hitler was released from prison after being locked up after a failed Nazi putsch in Munich, when the NYT wrote that imprisonment had left him "tamed" and "no longer to be feared."

 

After Hitler seized power in early 1933, implemented the dictatorial Enabling Acts, and annihilated the German Social Democratic Party and German Community Party, the Times’ Anne O’Hare McCormick received an exclusive interview with the Nazi leader. The story they published described him as having “the sensitive hand of an artist” and uncritically adopted Hitler’s terminology of “cleaning” for the destruction of German democracy and murder of its leftist parties.

 

Later, when Berlin hosted the 1936 Olympic Games, the Times glowingly wrote that "however much one may deplore or detest some of the excesses of the Hitler regime, the games make clear beyond question the amazing new energy and determination that have come to the German people." An even more glowing article a few days later described the German people as "happy and amicable beyond reckoning" and the country as “happy and prosperous almost beyond belief.”

 

Would that the US Newspaper of Record could garner such high praise for “autocratic” China, which is presently hosting the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Instead, the Times compared China's “Zero Covid” policy, which has spared the country of mass death, to the Nazi genocide via an obtuse “banality of evil” reference.

 

 

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