Opinion
Disability Chat with Sean Burke: “Thank you, sir”
From the Brownstone Institute
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control
The censors are losing patience. They have gone from regretting the existence of free speech and gaming the system as best they can to fantasizing about ending it through criminal penalties.
You can observe this change in temperament – from frustration to fury to calling for violent solutions – over the last several weeks. And it serves as a reminder: censorship was never the end point. It was always about controlling society’s “cognitive infrastructure,” which is how we think. And to what end? A secure monopoly on political power.
This week, Fox reporter Peter Doocy was sparring with the White House spokesperson over whether FEMA is funding migrants even as it cannot help American storm survivors. She immediately shot back and called this “disinformation.” Peter wanted to know what part of his question qualified. Jean-Pierre said it was the whole context of the question and otherwise never said.
It was clear to anyone who was watching that the term “disinformation” means to her nothing other than a premise or fact that is unwelcome and needs to be shut down. This messaging has been further reinforced by a Harris/Walz ad blaming unnamed “misinformation” from Trump for exacerbating hurricane suffering following Hurricane Helene.
This exchange came only days after Hillary Clinton suggested criminal penalties for disinformation, else “they will lose total control.” It’s an odd plural pronoun because, presumably, she is not in control..unless she regards herself as a proxy for an entire class of rulers.
Meanwhile, former presidential candidate John Kerry said the existence of free speech is making government impossible. Kamala Harris herself has sworn to “hold social media accountable” for the “hate infiltrating their platforms.” And well-connected physician Peter Hotez is calling for Homeland Security and NATO to put an end to debates over vaccines
You can detect the fury in all their voices, almost as if every post on X or video on Rumble is causing them to lose their minds, to the point that they are just saying it out loud: “Make them stop.”
Hurricane Milton seems to have caused the censors to flip out in a violent rage, as people wondered whether and to what extent the government might have something to do with manipulating the weather for political reasons. A writer in the Atlantic explodes: “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis,” while decrying “outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.”
Catch that? It’s the viewing itself that is the problem, as if people do not have the capacity to think for themselves.
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control, somehow forcing the whole of the digital age into a version of 1970s television with three channels and 1-800 numbers. The Biden administration even refounded the Internet, replacing the Declaration of Freedom with a new Declaration of the Future.
YouTube accounts have been demonetized and deleted. Facebook posts have been throttled and banned. LinkedIn’s algorithms punish posts that take issue with regime narratives. This has not slowed down in light of litigation but rather continued and intensified.
The goal is to close up the Internet. They would have done it by now if it were not for the First Amendment, which stands in their way. For now, they will continue to work through university cutouts, third-party providers, phony baloney fact-checkers, pressure on tech firms that provide government services at a price, and other mechanisms to achieve indirectly what they cannot do directly just yet.
Among the strategies is the political persecution of dissenters. Alex Jones is a bellwether here and his company is being bankrupted. Steve Bannon, the philosopher king of MAGA, has been in jail for the entire election season for having defied a Congressional subpoena on the advice of counsel. The protestors on January 6 have been in prison not for damages caused or trespassing but for landing on the wrong side of the regime.
Most of us had an intuition that the Covid vaccine mandates themselves were not entirely about health but rather a tactic of exclusion of those who were not fully trusting of authority. This was rather obvious when it came to the military and the medical profession but less apparent within academia where noncompliant students and professors were effectively purged for their refusal to risk their lives for pharma.
There was an element of malice, too, in the mask mandates. Even though there was zero scientific evidence that a Chinese-made synthetic cloth worn on the face can change epidemiological dynamics, they did serve well as a visible sign to separate believers from unbelievers, and also as a sadistic means of reminding individualists of who is really running the show.
The final means of censorship is violence against person and property, while the end is to control what you think in service of one-party rule. Major tech companies and major media are wholly complicit in bringing this about. Only a handful of services are stopping this and they are all being targeted by the regime through myriad forms of lawfare.
Postscript: as this article is released, the website archive.org has been fully down for the better part of a week, supposedly due to a catastrophic DDOS attack. The private owners say the data has been saved and it will be restored in time. Maybe. But consider: this the one tool we have for having a verified memory of what was posted when. It is how we found that WHO changed its definition of herd immunity. It’s how we found that the CDC was behind the mail-in ballot fiasco of 2020. It’s how we know that FTX funded anti-Ivermectin studies. And so on. The links were stable and good, never down.
Until now, two weeks before the election. We are of course supposed to believe that this shocking collapse is purely a coincidence. Maybe. Probably. And yet without this website – a central point of failure – vast amounts of the history of the last quarter century is deleted. The entire contents of the web can be re-written as vaporware, here one instant, gone the next. Even if this site does come back, what will be missing and how long will it take to figure it out? Will the Internet have been lobotomized? If not this time, could it happen in the future? Certainly.
Author
From the Fraser Institute
By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro
In yet another high-stakes maneuver in the fall session of Parliament, the Bloc Québécois recently tabled a motion urging the Trudeau government to support Bill C-319, which would increase Old Age Security (OAS) payments for seniors aged 65 to 74 by 10 per cent. The motion passed and the Bloc is threatening to trigger an election if the Trudeau government doesn’t give the bill final approval before October 29.
Meanwhile, according to a new poll, 79 per cent of Canadians “support or somewhat support” the OAS increase. But crucially, the poll provided no information to respondents about the costs associated with expanding OAS, even though Canadians should understand the costs before they pledge support for any government program.
Consider this—according to past polling, more than two-thirds of Canadians expressed support for the Trudeau government’s national dental care, $10-a-day daycare, and pharmacare programs. Yet once respondents were made aware of potential tax increases (specifically, increases to the GST), support plummeted to less than 50 per cent for all three programs.
Clearly, support for government programs can change dramatically once Canadians understand the costs since they ultimately must pay those costs. So, that being said, what are the costs of a 10 per cent increase in OAS payments for seniors aged 65 to 74?
According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux, the policy would cost more than $3 billion a year, with a five-year price tag of $16.1 billion—a “significant chunk of change” in his words.
Based on its latest budget, the Trudeau government expects to run deficits of at least $20.0 billion for the next five years and rack up more than $400 billion in new debt by 2028/29. If the government borrows more money to pay for increased OAS benefits, that debt number will grow even larger.
And again, Canadians will ultimately bear the costs of an expanded OAS through higher taxes in the future because Canadians must pay interest on government debt. This fiscal year (2024/25) federal debt interest costs are already expected to reach $54.1 billion—which is equal to the entire amount raised by the GST. These are taxpayer dollars that won’t go towards any services or programs for Canadians, and interest costs will continue to grow as the government adds more and more debt.
Finally, in addition to being costly, the plan is poorly targeted. While some programs such as the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) provide additional income support to low-income seniors, OAS provides support to many upper middle-income seniors. Indeed, based on current thresholds, individual seniors (aged 65 to 74) earning up to $148,451 per year are eligible to receive OAS (though seniors earning more than $90,997 of income don’t receive the full amount). Therefore, if Bill C-319 becomes law, a senior couple with a combined household income of nearly $300,000 will receive an increase in their OAS payments.
Increasing OAS payments will cost billions each year while supplementing the income of many seniors who aren’t in need. Despite the political theatre in Ottawa, Canadians are ultimately the ones who will foot the bill.
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