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.