(LifeSiteNews) — With a post on Zerohedge yesterday, journalist Matt Taibbi builds on the revelations of the Twitter Files with an introduction to the Western censorship industry.
Detailing the top 50 companies engaged in narrative control, the report is credited to Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, and 3 others via Racket News.
A comprehensive guide to the forces arrayed against free speech, the report begins with the dire warning of Dwight D Eisenhower against the power of a growing “military-industrial complex,” which would one day destroy democracy.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Eisenhower would be proud of Taibbi’s work, who with the Twitter Files has done much to expose just how far these forces have corrupted not only American democracy, but have captured the media of the formerly free world.
As Taibbi says:
The ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the ‘hybrid warfare’ age.
This is the reason he has joined this effort to document and expose the institutions who work to keep you safe from the dangers of free speech.
A handy guide to the enemies of freedom
The team hopes that this list will help readers, writers and journalists make better informed decisions about the provenance of their information. Taibbi continued:
‘The Top 50 List’ is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’
The list is in a handy magazine format, noting factors such as funding, the type of organization throttling speech, where they come from and how they do it. Taibbi’s remarks also reveal something of the dark arts – how these and other agents isolate and neutralize people who, in their view, have had too much to think.
Of course, these organizations are often presented as providing a service to the public good, keeping them safe from the contamination of unsterilized ideas. They call themselves “anti-disinformation” groups, fighting what the RAND Corporation recently called “truth decay.” How nice of them! Taibbi explains how they go about their selfless and principled work – to keep anyone anywhere from developing a think problem.
Taibbi writes:
Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same ‘hate-mapping,’ guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons.
There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same ‘hairball’ graphs.
The idea of protecting people from free speech is as ridiculous as it is sinister. As Tucker Carlson noted in his recent move to Twitter, without the freedom of speech you have no others.
It is for this reason it is obvious that free speech is a danger to democracy. Democracy, that is, as it is understood by the people who are destroying it – in order to defend it. This is no paranoid flight of fancy. Taibbi continues:
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of ‘balance’ between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation.
Before handing the floor to the fifty foremost agents of information warfare, Taibbi notes an important dimension of the rising power of the censorship industry. In seeking to stigmatize and marginalize any narrative in disagreement with that of the regime and its ideology, it hopes to train the general public to consider free speech a threat.
It is a form of aversion therapy, where the specters of hate, extremism, foreign interference and misinformation are invoked to warn people off anything that the elites do not want you to see.
Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that ‘shared vocabulary’ to deploy on the hybrid battlefield.
They propose to serve as the guardians of that ‘vocabulary,’ which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which ‘public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.’
This report is a welcome addition to the arsenal of freedom, with dystopian censorship bills and legal penalties attached to anything the regime defines as “hate speech.” The march of this capture has not been halted by this report, but its comprehensive nature means it is very likely to remain a stone in the shoe of information suppression for a long time.