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Brownstone Institute

It Was Always About Control

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Richard KellyRICHARD KELLY

Early on in March 2020 I was leery of the hysteria surrounding Covid and decided my course of action was to be wait and see. At the time I was under the impression that I was a freeborn citizen with a number of unalienable rights, including sovereignty over my bodily choices.

So when the talk started about new vaccines being imminent, I again decided I would wait and see whether the vaccines were all they were cracked up to be. This was then, and is now, an entirely reasonable position to take, screeching from media and Twitter hounds notwithstanding. I didn’t expect it would turn out to be more like “wait and see how totally out of hand this will get.”

  • Wait and see how the government will forcibly close businesses
  • Wait and see how treatments will be suppressed
  • Wait and see how hysteria captured the media
  • Wait and see how healthy populations will be subject to house arrest
  • Wait and see how police will shoot protesters
  • Wait and see how a pregnant mother will be arrested for a Facebook post
  • Wait and see how medical services across state borders will be denied
  • Wait and see how ‘wait and see-ers’ will be demonized
  • Wait and see how family and friends will betray their loved ones

Well, I’ve waited long enough and I’ve seen more than enough. Thankfully the worst, most violent excesses have abated for now, if you exclude the ongoing carnage of short and long-term vaccine injury. There are lingering abominations from the blitzkrieg of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but generally there is a sense that an uneasy peace, or maybe a phoney war, has descended on us.

Of course, there is still a serious amount of Covid pantomime going on.

Exhibit A: a TV news report recently showed a road accident victim doing rehab with a mask on, then happily chatting without a mask to the reporter, also without a mask. If he was worried about Covid he’d leave it on for the interview, or if he wasn’t worried he wouldn’t wear it while doing rehab. Seems you can have it both ways these days provided you don’t think about it too much.

Exhibit B: Last year cricket teams in the BBL were decimated if one of the players had a positive test, and others were ‘close contacts.’ Umpires refused to hold a bowler’s cap or sunglasses for fear of the spicy cough. Last night, two players on one team played despite not only testing positive, but also feeling unwell. If there is no practical change when a player has Covid, why do we need to know about it?

Answer: we don’t, but it has become normalised to disclose players’ private health statuses, just as it is normalised now to ask anyone any kind of detailed personal health question that satiates the questioner’s ghoulish fetishes. While player fitness has always been a matter of interest to sports fans, especially those who like a bet, illness used to be dealt with in a formulaic way, such as “Player X is not playing tonight due to illness.” There’s no need to know any further details.

Exhibit C: The memorial concert for aboriginal singer Archie Roach included a pre-concert ‘smoking ceremony’ in which footage aired for a news report showed a woman dancing through the ceremonial smoke – while wearing a mask. This example is probably less deliberate pantomime and more genuine irrationality. Anyone donning a mask and expecting to keep a virus out but let smoke in has taken leave of their rationality. Ironically, in this case the mask may actually do some good in preventing larger smoke particles entering the lungs – what firefighters call ‘smoke inhalation.’

It is counterproductive to scoff at these insanities – those who have not yet come in their own time to see the inconsistencies are not suddenly going to see the light because of a witty remark. The most likely reaction is an equally irrational, and possibly heated defence of the person or the rule. In valued relationships, the only sensible course is studied silence. Even a raised eyebrow in front of the TV can crank the tension in the room up a notch or two.

But these annoyances over masks and ‘Covid protocols,’ that overused euphemism for voodoo superstitions, are yesterday’s skirmishes in a war that has moved on to other theatres. The central battle is about freedom and autonomy. To the extent that the spoils of the ‘mask and protocol’ incursions can be re-weaponised against us, winning the freedom and autonomy battle will be that much harder.

How can we resist curbs on movement having once complied with QR scanning for going to the shops? Think it couldn’t happen? Oxford city council in the UK is moving ahead with a scheme to confine residents to one of 6 zones using electronic gates on roads and limited number of trips across zones.

How could we resist a forced medical treatment having once rolled over to experimental gene therapy? How can we fight against programmable digital currency when once we have accepted ‘card only’ cashiers and accommodated the idea of shopping for ‘essential items’ only and allowing a cop to rummage around in our shopping trolley?

The legislative bricks in the wall continue to be put into place with little if any scrutiny. Doctors are now unable to give opinions that depart from government health advice without risking de-registration. Pandemic laws born as bastard sons of parliaments suspended under state of emergency powers are now legitimised as permanent statutes, requiring only a declaration to bring them all into force once again. Digital ID’s are now compulsory for all company directors, including Mums and Dads who happen to be directors of their own superannuation funds. Ordinary citizens are surely next.

How is it that our lawmakers feel it appropriate to make these kinds of changes? No one asked for them. How is it they can ignore letters and petitions? Why do they partner with unelected globalists and make treaties we won’t be allowed to vote on? How is it that our civil rights institutions were so toothless? They didn’t even utter a whimper, let alone a growl. How is it that our professional bodies and business associations were silent?

Only a few brave souls protested. How is it that our police forces humiliated themselves to the point where they were taping off children’s playgrounds and fining elderly women for sitting on a park bench? We long ago gave up on the idea that the mainstream media would hold authorities to account.

In the end the explanations, whether we get them or not, whether they make sense or not, are beside the point. Nothing can change what happened. By some miracle we might avert what they have planned, but it’s going to be a hell of a fight.

Once upon a time, we sweated on daily case numbers when the new cases per day were less than 10; now we barely think of them, and they are in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. There’s only one conclusion to be drawn – it was never about public health, and it still isn’t. It was always about control.

Reprinted from the author’s Substack

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  • Richard Kelly

    Richard Kelly, a retired 60 yo, born and bred in Melbourne. He spent a couple of years as a mathematics teacher before moving into Insurance and Superannuation/Investments first as a trainee actuary and then as a business analyst with some of the largest institutions in Australia and worked in Paris France for 3 years (2000 – 2003) with AXA.

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Brownstone Institute

The White House Makes Good on Its Antitrust Threats

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY Jeffrey A. TuckerJEFFREY A. TUCKER

On May 5, 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a mob-like warning to social-media companies and information distributors generally. They need to get with the program and start censoring critics of Covid policy. They need to amplify government propaganda. After all, it would be a shame if something would happen to these companies.

These were her exact words:

The president’s view is that the major platforms have a responsibility related to the health and safety of all Americans to stop amplifying untrustworthy content, disinformation and misinformation, especially related to Covid-19 vaccinations and elections. And we’ve seen that over the past several months. Broadly speaking, I’m not placing any blame on any individual or group. We’ve seen it from a number of sources. He also supports better privacy protections and a robust antitrust programSo, his view is that there’s more that needs to be done to ensure that this type of misinformation, disinformation, damaging, sometimes life threatening information is not going out to the American public.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The Justice Department calls this anticompetitive even though competing is exactly the source of Apple’s market strength. That has always been true. Yes, there is every reason to be annoyed at the company’s hammer-and-tongs enforcement of its intellectual property. But their IP is not the driving force of the company’s success. Its products and services are.

Beyond that, there is a darker agenda here. It’s about bringing new media into the government propaganda fold, exactly as Psaki threatened. Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Over the last 4 to 6 years, governments have used all these methods to violate free speech rights. We are sitting on tens of thousands of pages of proof of this. What seemed like spotty takedowns of true information has been revealed as a vast machinery now called the Censorship Industrial Complex involving dozens of agencies, nearly one hundred universities, and many foundations and nonprofit organizations directly or indirectly funded by government.

You would have to be willfully blind not to see the long-run ambition. The goal is a mass reversion to the past, a world like we had in the 1970s with three networks and limited information sources about anything going on in government. Back then, people did not know what they did not know. That’s how effective the system was. It came about not entirely because of active censorship but because of technological limitations.

The information age is called that because it blew up the old system, offering hope of a new world of universal distribution of ever more information about everything, and promising to empower billions of users themselves to become distributors. That’s how the company YouTube got its name: everyone could be a TV producer.

That dream was hatched in the 1980s, gained great progress in the 1990s and 2000s, and began fundamentally to upend government structures in the 2010s. Following Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 – two major events that were not supposed to happen – a deep establishment said that’s enough. They scapegoated the new systems of information for disrupting the plans of decades and reversing the planned course of history.

The ambition to control every nook and cranny of the Internet sounds far-flung but what choice do they have? This is why this machinery of censorship has been constructed and why there is such a push to have artificial intelligence take over the job of content curation. In this case, machines alone do the job without human intervention, making litigation nearly impossible.

The Supreme Court has the chance to do something to stop this but it’s not clear that many Justices even understand the scale of the problem or the Constitutional strictures against it. Some seem to think that this is only about the right of government officials to pick up the phone and complain to reporters about their coverage. That is absolutely not the issue: content curation affects hundreds of millions of people, not just those posting but those reading too.

Still, if there is some concern about the supposed rights of government actors, there is a clear solution offered by David Friedman: post all information and exhortations about topics and content in a public forum. If the Biden or Trump administration has a preference for how social media should behave, it is free to file a ticket like everyone else and the recipient can and should make it and the response public.

This is not an unreasonable suggestion, and it should certainly figure into any judgment made by the Supreme Court. The federal government has always put out press releases. That’s a normal part of functioning. Bombarding private companies with secret takedown notices and otherwise deploying a huge plethora of intimidation tactics should not even be permitted.

Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple. The mask of such official actions is now removed.

Just as the FDA and CDC became marketing and enforcement arms of Pfizer and Moderna, so too the Justice Department is now revealed as a censor and industrial promoter of Samsung. This is how captured agencies with hegemonic ambitions operate, not in the public interest but in the private interest of some industries over others and always with the goal of reducing the freedom of the people.

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

Journalistic Malpractice at The New York Times

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From the Brownstone Institute

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

An obsequious press corps now serves as the mouthpiece for the country’s vast censorship apparatus. Last Sunday, The New York Times ran a front page story “How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation.”

The Gray Lady covered the battle for the First Amendment in familiar doublethink. As we’ve covered throughout the Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri) proceedings, the censors deny the censorship exists while insisting we should be thankful that it does.

Government lawyers have argued that plaintiffs manufactured the case, and the allegations of censorship are nothing more than “an assortment of out-of-context quotes and select portions of documents that distort the record to build a narrative that the bare facts simply do not support.” At the same time, they insist the censorship is necessary “to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.”

Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe followed their lead, arguing that the private-public censorship apparatus is a “thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” but that eliminating it “will make us less secure as a nation and will endanger us all every day.”

Now, The New York Times and other news outlets have joined in supporting the censors. The piece cites Nina Jankowicz, the aspiring tyrant known for her Mary Poppins-themed calls for censorship, who claimed there was “no shred of evidence” behind allegations that the Biden administration called to stifle dissent.

The article describes the censorship apparatus as a farcical right-wing fever dream in which President Trump “casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.” At the same time, the authors cite the American Intelligence Community’s leading advocates for restricting the flow of information.

Jankowicz headed the Department of Homeland Security’s board on disinformation until the Biden administration suspended the Domestic Ministry of Truth in response to reports that Jankowicz was a prolific spreader of misinformation, including the Steele Dossier and the Hunter Biden laptop.

Jankowicz complained, without irony, to the Times that the resistance to online censorship created a “chilling effect.” She explained, “Nobody wants to be caught up in it.”

The Times also quoted Katie Starbird, who said that “the people that benefit from the spread of disinformation have effectively silenced many of the people that would try to call them out.” The Gray Lady did not note the irony that Starbird claimed to be “silenced” as the paper of record quoted her on the front page of the Sunday edition, nor did they explain her role at CISA, the Department of Homeland Security agency at the center of the censorship industry.

While serving on CISA’s “Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee, Starbird lamented that many Americans seem to “accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms.” Of course, those “norms” have been protected by the First Amendment for over 200 years. But CISA – led by zealots like Dr. Starbird – appointed themselves the arbiters of truth and worked with the most powerful information companies in the world to purge dissent.

The Times, Starbird, and Jankowicz represent the foundational lie underpinning the entire censorship complex: that the government and its bureaucrats hold a monopoly on truth. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson apparently shared this view in oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, as she advocated for the right to abridge free speech provided the government offers a “compelling state interest.”

The First Amendment does not discriminate between true and false ideas; it offers a blanket protection of speech regardless of veracity. But notwithstanding legal protections, the Government has been the most prolific spreader of “misinformation” in the last four years. From natural immunity, to lockdowns, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, to travel restrictions, to fatality rates, the “trust the science” crowd has silenced dissent that has often been more accurate than their government decrees.

In this process, left-wing institutions have abandoned their liberal values in the pursuit of power. As Brownstone outlined in “A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri,” supposedly liberal groups like Stanford University and Democratic Attorneys General urged the Court to promote censorship while the ACLU remained derelict in silence.

Journalists – once heralded as the Fourth Estate – have joined forces with the regime to disparage its challengers. In Slate, Mark Joseph Stern referred to Murthy v. Missouri as “inane” and “brain-meltingly dumb.” He made no effort to report the hundreds of pages in discovery that revealed the coordinated censorship campaigns directed from the White House, the Intelligence Community, and Big Tech, nor did he grapple with the laundry list of follies that flourished under government-sponsored censorship, including the Iraq War, Covid lockdowns, or Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Instead, he declares definitively that the Biden administration – the same one that proudly ignores the Court’s orders on student loans and demands the censorship of its political enemies – acted within its powers in response to “a once-in-a-century pandemic.”

These conclusory statements, utterly detached from the truth, are nothing new for Stern, whose work reveals him to be little more than a spokesman for the Democratic Party. In the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, he called for increased investigations into Julie Swetnick’s easily-debunked allegation that Kavanaugh was a ring leader for a group of high school gang rapists. He described Christine Blasey Ford, a serial liar who has no evidence she ever met Kavanaugh, as a “folk hero to the left for the rest of time.” He chastised justices for not wearing masks as late as 2022 and derided judicial review of the nonsensical airline mask mandate as evidence of a “power-drunk juristocracy” and “badly broken” system.

Like so much of the authoritarian left, there is no nuance or variety to the power-seeking gambits. From mail-in voting to vaccine mandates to lockdowns to Elon Musk to affirmative action, the Slate author moves in lockstep with the mindless herd.

Stern is in no way remarkable, but he represents the transformation of the American left, which has ushered in a new era of authoritarianism draped in progressive language. Like Justice Jackson, the wolf comes in sheep’s clothing, dressed in politically correct standards of affirmative action and diversity politics. But the rainbow veneer cannot overcome the insidious threat to our republic.

The federal bureaucracy has hijacked our information centers to protect their own interests. They’ve stifled dissent to perpetuate their power, and the mainstream press has bowed to the Leviathan. Supreme Court Justices, perhaps the last line of defense against the tyrants’ aspiration to codify totalitarianism into law, appear primed to abandon the First Amendment.

A ruling for the government in Murthy v. Missouri could permanently transform the nation, the relationship between Government and private businesses, and Americans’ right to information. Even more alarmingly, it would suggest that due process no longer reigns supreme over political favoritism.

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he would give the Devil the protection of the law. Roper responds that he’d “cut down every law in England” to get to the Devil.

“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” More asks. “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down…do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

Justice Jackson, the Biden Administration, Katie Starbird, and their allies in the media may believe they have a divine mission to censor alleged misinformation, that the Devil’s reincarnation has taken multiple forms in the bodies of RFK Jr., Alex Berenson, Jay Bhattacharya, and others; under our Constitution, however, the self-professed nobility of their missions does not excuse violations of the First Amendment.

Let us hope the Court realizes the graveness of the threat.

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  • Brownstone Institute

    Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit organization conceived of in May 2021 in support of a society that minimizes the role of violence in public life.

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