Dear Reader,
The gumshoes at watchhound outfit Open the Books report that:
- Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has spent $267 million on research grants with the term “misinformation” in the proposal.
- Sure enough, the feds have spent at least $127 million in grants specifically targeted to study the spread of “misinformation” — or to help people “overcome” it, so to speak — by persuading them to go along with Covid-related public health recommendations and mandates…
- According to (one) grant description, “concern about the spread of misinformation and its role in undermining scientific expertise and facts in civic dialogue has grown significantly, especially over the last 5-10 years.”
Just so. Yet questions instantly present themselves…
Why Should We Trust You?
Here is one question: Why has “misinformation” undermined scientific expertise and facts in civic dialogue over the last 5-10 years?
Is it perhaps because much scientific expertise and facts in civic dialogue… were themselves exposed as misinformation?
Reliable evidence indicates vaccines were not “safe and effective.”
Yet hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, many scientific reports conclude, were — to a fair degree at least.
The mainstream media gave these reports a good and hard smothering.
Hurry, the Sky Is Falling!
Meantime, scientific experts have been yelling about climactic collapse for years and years.
If we do not tackle climate change by such and such date, they intoned, Earth will cook.
Yet the wolf has never appeared upon the doorstep. And voters… apparently… do not believe it will.
When trust is lost, trust is lost. And I believe trust is lost.
Here are two related questions:
What distinguishes information from misinformation? And who is authorized to draw the distinction?
The answer — says the United States government — is the United States government.
Trust Us
Here is what we are told, in essence:
Government alone must distinguish reality from unreality.
Government alone must determine which viewpoints are permissible… and which viewpoints are not permissible.
Government alone must police the minds of its citizens.
That is, government must run a corner on thought itself.
Yet I concede that I misrepresent the facts…
“Government” believes nothing — it is a lifeless and inert mass. Government itself lacks all agency, all volition.
It is rather the blackguards and jacklegs who crew it who are responsible. It is they who mandate the censoring. It is they who tape mouths.
To Elites, Democracy Dies in Sunlight
More specifically yet, it is the directors of government who scotches dissent, who tape mouths.
These tinpot overlords believe democracy dies not in darkness — but in sunlight.
They believe there is too much sunlight coming in. And they are out to restrict the solar inflow.
Mr. Michael Benz once toiled for the State Department of the United States in the field of cybertechnology.
He presently directs an outfit named the Foundation for Freedom Online. Here is his central thesis:
The federal government of the United States is perpetrating a ruthless information warfare upon the American people.
If it does not, government elites — noun, not adjective — fear the American people will not become vaccinated…
We Know Better
Elites believe undereducated Americans will ingest “horse paste” and guzzle bleach to scotch the virus…
That they will disbelieve in catastrophic climate change…
That they may even elect Donald John Trump president.
Against these monstrous evils our wisemen stand arrayed… in high vigilance… and even higher morality.
Thus they have anointed themselves the guardians of democracy. In fact, they believe they are democracy itself.
And populism, so-called, is their mortal foe.
“We ARE Democracy!”
Mr. Benz:
- All of the elite establishments… under threat from the rise of domestic populism declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. Because if you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves…
- What they essentially said is we need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. And who are the democratic institutions? Oh, it’s us. It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank. It’s the mainstream media, it is the NGOs.
More:
- From their perspective, if [they] did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse…
- Their whole-of-society model explicitly proposed that we need every single asset within society to be mobilized in a whole-of-society effort to stop misinformation online…
Americans Are Equal to Foreign Enemies
The intelligence agencies of the United States — once restricted to overseas spookwork — proceeded to train their sensory apparatus inward upon the American people.
Thus American domestic opposition to elite priorities became — in essence — foreign enemies.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump was the central catalyst, the prime accelerant. Benz:
- It became full throttle when Trump was elected… Where they took all of this censorship architecture spanning DHS, the FBI, the CIA, the DoD, the DOJ and then the thousands of government-funded NGO and private-sector mercenary firms were all basically transited from a foreign predicate, a Russian disinformation predicate to a democracy predicate, by saying that disinformation is not just a threat when it comes from the Russians, it’s actually an intrinsic threat to democracy itself.
- And so by that, they were able to launder the entire democracy-promotion regime-change tool kit just in time for the 2020 election…
- It gave rise to this multibillion-dollar censorship industry that joins together the military industrial complex, the government, the private sector, the civil society organizations and then this vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact-checker groups that serve as this sort of sentinel class that surveys every word on the internet…
1984 Come to Life
Now this bunch is attempting to harness Artificial Intelligence for its purposes. It is the holiest, holiest grail of any possible grail.
And that is precisely why they are after it.
Here I revisit Open the Book
- The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.
Imagine it — Artificial Intelligence, captured — captured by the censorious mouth-tapers…
Yesterday’s Soviet Union would be a lighthouse of openness next to it…
Today’s North Korea would be a fortress of civil liberties…
And tomorrow’s America would be democracy itself…
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
