Power Grab

A Word on Free Speech

After I wrote my last post on government censorship, they went and tried to do it harder. Biden is screaming about Twitter. Hillary is demanding that the EU, who has no Constitution protecting free speech, pass laws to force Twitter into censorship.

I planned for this. My server is outside of US or EU control. I’m not saying that this website can’t be silenced if the US is determined, just that it won’t be easy.

I agree with Aesop on this one: I just don’t see these wholesale tyrants giving up power voluntarily. There will be bloodshed.

Some have suggested that I switch this blog to an email service if free voices on the Internet are finally silenced. I don’t think I will do that. Should that come to pass, I think we can agree that at that point, the time for talking is over.

There are other ways to be heard, and we won’t be silenced.

By Divemedic, ago

Propaganda Warfare

Back in June, I wrote about the Biden administration establishing a Ministry of Truth to police anyone online that would distribute facts that the government finds objectionable. This is one of the reasons why my server isn’t in the US. Anyway, the idea isn’t dead. A leaked document from DHS (pdf Alert) details how the Feds are going to police wrongthink and limit what people have to say. The Office of the Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security is endeavoring to stop “dangerous” ideas from spreading on the internet. They claim that they won’t be preventing free speech, but I don’t trust that any further than I do a promise from Obama that I can keep my doctor.

The Global War on Terror has effectively ended. Terror won, in case you didn’t know. The US got its ass kicked, and the Afghanistan airlift proved that to the world. Anyway, all of those Federal Employees have to find something else to do in order to mark time and fulfill budgets until they can retire, so the war on freedom inconvenient facts disinformation is just the ticket. The Intercept reports:

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

That is why my server is in another country. In fact, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media meet on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives . The meetings between the private sector and government are for representatives of those government agencies to dictate how firms would handle what the government calls ‘misinformation’ being distributed over media- including social media.

Just months before the 2020 election, the FBI and other agencies met with large media companies to discuss how the election results would be reported. Why would you need to discuss them? Just report the results. The answer, of course, is that the results and their dissemination would have to be “handled” and “spun” so that the people would accept what they were being told.

During the March 2022 meeting, an FBI official warned that statements made on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government. According to senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan Chase who were in attendance in that meeting, the FBI stressed that we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable. In other words, the FBI is attempting to turn our media, including social media, into official information outlets of the state.

The FBI even has a special portal that they use to “request” that Facebook censor or throttle certain statements or information. The DHS division that is in charge of managing this is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The CISA has an advisory committee that includes the former Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety- none other than Vijaya Gadde, who was fired this week by Elon Musk.

That committee drafted a report calling for the CISA to remake the “information ecosystem.” This would involve the CISA closely monitoring “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, ‘hyper partisan’ media, talk radio and other online resources.” The committee made the case that the government needed to take steps to halt the “spread of false and misleading information,” with a focus on information that undermines “key democratic institutions, such as the courts, the financial system, or public health measures.”

When business and government merge in order to forward the aims of the government to control the population is Mussolini Fascism.

“The Fascist conception of life,” Mussolini wrote, “stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.” Sound familiar? To me, it sounds like the very platform of the Democrats today.

Gizmodo is getting onboard with this:

Gullible people eat up a gross diet of disinfo and loosely-factually-vetted, ideology-soaked infotainment, then run off to cause chaos in the real world. Who knows how bad things could get now with Elon on the loose

The odd thing about all of this is that the leftist media is screaming about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the ones spreading disinformation, but they aren’t the ones in charge of the government, now are they? The left is trying to insinuate that the appointees of Donald Trump are still in government and trying to sow disinformation, but I am not sure that anyone with half a brain thinks that DJT was ever in charge of the bureaucratic branches of the swamp.

The government is expanding its efforts to control the media. That same inspector general report details how the Customs and Border Protection determines whether information spread through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are accurate. The report also lists how agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement determine whether social media accounts are bots or humans, and how the mayhem caused by bots affects behavior. The Secret Service has reportedly also expanded their purview to include disinformation.

Keep in mind that President Biden has said that MAGA Republicans are the enemy of the state, and now you see how the war on those who would oppose the left is proceeding. Be ready.

By Divemedic, ago

Awww… Who’s a sad clown?

Robert Reich:

What ever happened to last year’s opinion?

LOL. You told people that if they didn’t like it, they should get their own Twitter, so they did. Schadenboner.

By Divemedic, ago

Keeping Cautious Watch

Politico reports that big money Democrat donors have stopped pouring money into Florida, and this indicates in their opinion, that Florida is no longer seen as a potential win for Democrat candidates. They go on to claim that this is a potential disaster in the making for Democrat hopes in 2024. There is another possibility that I think is being overlooked:

What if the billionaires have stopped donating money because they know that the key to winning elections is no longer to be found in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising only to still see a possibility of losing? What if ten million could be spent hacking election systems and machines to guarantee a win instead? Wouldn’t that be more cost effective?

If there is anything that we learned from the 2020 election, it was to prove that elections could be rigged. After all, they did it in the open, bragged about it, then Time Magazine even did an article admitting to their part in it. We know that they will do it again. We know that there has been shenanigans in elections for decades. The only question remains: Can and will they do it again?

The election next month will be the test. We are less than a week and a half from finding out if we still live in a Republic where the democratic process chooses our representatives, or if we are living in a country ruled by oligarch fascisti. All of the polls, all of the data, and even history are pointing to a major landslide to the right in this election.

History usually marks a loss for the sitting president‘s party.

The only presidents to preside over negative income growth by the midterms — Eisenhower in 1954 and 1958, and Nixon in 1974 — did quite poorly. Even Obama in 2010 and Clinton in 1994, with their historic midterm losses, saw some income growth, though it was notably weak.

Five38 is projecting an 81 percent chance that the Republicans will win the house, with a 52 percent chance of the Democrats claiming the Senate. For governors: In the southeast, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas are all electing governors, and in every one of those states there is a greater than 90 percent chance that the Republican will win.

The economy is in a shambles. The President is extremely unpopular with a 53 percent disapproval rating.

Watch each of those races closely. If a pile of them go the other way, start looking for fuckery. Even if the Republicans DO win, don’t expect much to change. One thing that the Republicans have proven time and again is that, once they get in power, they never know what to do with it, and wind up wasting capital on useless gestures that accomplish nothing.

By Divemedic, ago

Correction

I want to make a correction to my earlier post about the Rubio staffer who was attacked. It turns out that the attacker was Christopher Monzon. The man who attacked him was Javier Jesus Lopez. I got the names reversed in my original post.

I also want to add that the press, especially the openly communist press in Miami, is running with the “white supremacist” claims. The press is now reporting that Monzon was at the Charlottesville protest. I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Let’s say that every claim is true- he WAS at the Charlottesville protest. How would his attacker have known that? Even if Monzon was there, and even if his attacker knew that, does that mean his attacker gets a free pass?

This is dangerous territory. A continuation of Antifa’s “punch a Nazi” campaign, it’s a call to political violence. They forget that this can work both ways. Did a person say something mean about you? Beat them within an inch of their lives…” I seem to recall a certain asshole calling me deplorable.

By Divemedic, ago

Targeting

Communists are still committing violence against the right. A staffer for Marco Rubio suffered serious injuries late Sunday night while knocking on doors as a campaign worker.

“Last night one of our canvassers wearing my T-shirt and a DeSantis hat was brutally attacked by 4 animals who told him Republicans weren’t allowed in their neighborhood in Hialeah, Florida”

By Divemedic, ago

First Amendment

If the government pays a burglar to break into your house to see what you have, then the police use that evidence to arrest you, they have just violated your right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

If the government pays a private contractor to burn down your church, or throw you in prison, or even prevent you from publishing books, your rights have been violated. It doesn’t matter if a business did it, especially if they did it at the behest of the government. If the government and businesses work together to deprive their citizens of rights, that is fascism. In fact, that is EXACTLY what Mussolini did.

With all that being said, the Biden administration has passed a regulation that bans the sale or distribution of books written by certain people, and they are getting the world’s largest book seller to enforce it.

This is a clear violation of the First Amendment, and was even used as an example during oral arguments in the Heller case. It was Chief Justice Roberts who asked “Would it be constitutionally acceptable for a municipality to ban books as long as newspapers—a viable substitute source of expression—were still legal?” The answer is no, of course.

How far we have come since then.

By Divemedic, ago

Real Goal of the Alex Jones Judgement

Alex Jones has to pay $1 billion. He says he will fight, delay, and appeal for years. In any case, he is likely done. Still, the reason for what was done to him is apparent to anyone paying attention. Just look at this article from the Guardian: Only proper online regulation can stop poisonous conspiracists like Alex Jones and by Alex Jones, they mean anyone on the right, including and especially Donald Trump. I quote:

Jones, like QAnon, Donald Trump and others, can navigate fake news sites and social media to reach millions…No one seriously believes free speech is an absolute right. The British government is now making desperate attempts to define such concepts as “causing offence” and “legal but harmful”. More ruthless efforts at control are emerging from authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The EU, too, is pondering regulation. But this realm of government is patently in its infancy.

The freedom of speech which to John Milton was “above all liberties” is not that simple today.

You get that? They consider censorship like Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the EU, and the UK are preferable to the freedom to say what you think. That is the lesson of Alex Jones: shut up, peasant. Silencing the opposition, it’s what every communist revolution needs to do.

By Divemedic, ago