Michael K. Smith's Blog, page 14

Kamala Harris Speaks, And Says Nothing

"So, I think it's very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present. And to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history, and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future."

-------Vice President Kamala Harris, First Speech on the 2024 Campaign Trail

See "Biden Aides WORRIED Kamala Could Sink Ticket," Rising, The Hill, April 26, 2023

 

Capitalism is Democratic the way Rape is Romance

 

 

 

Capitalism is Democratic the Way Rape is Romance

 

“Whenever I see he/him or she/herI think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amidthe pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern isclinging to your pronouns."

Norman Finkelstein

 

 

The present mental state ofthe American public is almost as bad as the ruling military idiocy which ispushing us closer to a nuclear confrontation as we conduct a proxy war against Russiausing Ukrainian lives while we supply the weapons. In the face of this and arecent United Nations report calling for more urgency than ever in dealing withthe environmental breakdown of nature under assault by capitalist marketmadness, Americans are under an attack on sanity more deadly than ever for notdealing with material circumstances but rather a set of alleged problems whichmake fairy tales sound like intellectually sound reports on material reality.

 

Herds of otherwise thoughtfulpeople are moved to become an intellectual lynch mob as consciousness controland mind management organizes a frenzy of demands to televise the Trump courtfiascos, suppress speech found painful by privileged folks totally protectedfrom physical pain, and other aspects of personality and character disordersamong a socially tortured people suffering political and economic deprivationunder the rule of morally depraved leadership whose power comes from amassingincredible wealth and having its political servant class accept  and teach that as democracy. Suppression ofthought and rape of language labels a market process as electoral choice and apolitical system threatening more people with less information than ever beforeis dubbed “our democracy”.

 

You know, the one in which JulianAssange is driven closer to death by hordes of former reporters who have becomestorm troopers in the army of propaganda purveyors who were once at least anoccasional source of fairly unbiased news reporting. As banking and financeshow signs of near collapse and most of the world moves further from dependenceon the American dollar that is fast becoming as sound as digital or counterfeitcurrency, and the murderous war budget continues to grow in killing Russians bysacrificing Ukrainians lives along with American dollars, an assortment ofallegedly life or death struggles over races other than human, genders otherthan male and female, and other themes and variations of fantasy fiction which actas  programmed mental blockades for thepublic, as we sink closer to mental and physical doom that threatens far morethan only our nation.

 

The breaking down of a globalsystem of imperialism shows itself in a variety of ways that remain invisible,unheard, unseen and never analyzed in the main stream of consciousness controland mind management that fading ruling powers are using in more desperatefashion than any previous assault on American mental health. The dailypoisoning of national capacity to think has become a raging epidemic to makethe corona virus seem almost simple by comparison, though it came from the samesource: capital private profit marketing under the guise of freedom anddemocracy that guarantees Americans the right to buy a weapon in order toprotect themselves from the most frightening creatures in the universe: other Americans.

 

 We are warned against fictional problems withChinese “spy” balloons and Chinese “spy” police while murdering one another,frequently in groups ranging from children and their teachers to shoppers at amall or worshippers at a proposed religious haven and spending hundreds ofbillions to menace and murder all over the world as a form of protection for whatpeople who make religious fanatics seem thoughtful call “our” democracy”.

 

This cherished fantasy takesplace in a population in which 8% are millionaires; multi-millionaires andbillionaires while the overwhelming 92% majority are manipulated when notphysically beaten into accepting such idiocy as “equality”.

 

The billions keep pouringinto the proxy war in the Ukraine which murders Russians who are alleged tohave invaded when the truth is their borders have been menaced by the U.S. andits Nato lap dogs since the end of the soviet union and communist rule whichsupposedly brought the world closer to peace. But not according to the rulingpowers of minority wealth which expanded its war profiteering and actually furthermenaced the future with nuclear war as the aggressive minority which rulesAmerica asserted its deadly control more fully by making a sick joke of wordslike democracy, freedom and equality, while destroying every step in thedirection nations took trying to achieve such things, most especially our own.

 

A population previouslyfrightened by profitable pro or anti trans fat diets has become enamored ofmore profitable trans gender relations, further alienating many while pleasingothers troubled by what may have once involved seeking counsel or joining achurch or drinking alcohol or taking drugs or all four and more. We are alreadyembroiled in a supposed democratic action which is to begin more than a yearinto the future when the two parties of capitalism will wage multi billiondollar marketing wars called a presidential election. At the present momentthere is no alternative voice beyond the Green party, which is at a severe disadvantagein a supposed capitalist democracy. It does not have billions of dollarsstashed with which to buy marketing time to see its program which calls forsystem change and not simply a cosmetic personnel change to reward one oranother nice guy-girl-man-woman-shim from an identity group otherthan-different from others in the creation of ever more alienation and divisionamong the people to strengthen our ruling minority and its front line servantdemublicans and republicrats.

 

Our savage divisions underfalse race idiocy in denial of the fact that we are all members of the one andonly human race have been joined by seemingly lesser but just as dangerousdivisions alleging more than the two sexes involved in human evolution. A surgeof separate but unequal identity groups has occurred as ruling power worksharder than ever to divide humanity and thus make majority action democracyimpossible. Unless disabled Polish American gay Jews of color are acknowledgedprogress is impossible and poor people can just drop dead on the streets untilalleged bi-racial trans-sexual-tri-species-quad brained humans take their placealongside Batman, Captain Marvel, fairy godmothers, Founding Fathers andenchanted animals.

 

Considering the fact that theoverwhelming 92% majority of us are carrying more than 31 trillion dollars inpublic debt, more than 16 billion in personal debt and have absolutely nochance under capitalist private profit political economics of seeing anythingbut further growth in that debt, we should move to at least share the pronoun “asshole”as at least one way of establishing our common membership in a class of humansreduced to mental slavery under the assault on our ability to think. But thereis hope, and not only from the rapid awakening in the rest of the world thatAmerica is not some biblical ruler of the universe but from the awarenessgrowing here despite all thought suppression that if we don’t do somethingabout it humanity and most especially America will suffer even more greatly.

 

Still, minority control ofour minds and worse our nuclear weapons and their desire and commitment todestroying Russia and China make it all the more important that struggles forone or another minority or one or another aspect of environmental destruction thatdo not confront capitalist private profit-public loss political economics asthe root cause of our problems will make them far more difficult if notimpossible to solve.

 

Making a profit by creatingelectric cars instead of gasoline-powered vehicles will benefit minoritycapital and some of its servants but we need to reduce the total environmentallydestructive control of life that the private automobile has become. Not onlydoes it pollute but private profit auto transit creates public loss by killingtens of thousands of us every year, while crippling even more along withfouling air and poisoning land. We need public transit that makes it possiblefor any of us to get anywhere in time for whatever we have to do and for it tobe safe enough to guarantee an end to the sheer butchery of the overwhelminglywasteful and murderous single occupant private auto transit system. And thatwill only be possible when we have democratic control of the economy throughpolitical democracy which is absolutely impossible under minority dominatedprivate profit- public loss capitalism.

 

Whether we achieve thatpeacefully or not will depend on shattering the steel curtain covering materialreality with a media strengthened view of reality that is a nightmare trendingtowards a disaster. We need to wake up from an induced slumber so that all ofus, whether pigeonholed by our rulers as left or right, can come together,transform reality before it destroys us, and salvage our world and our race asunified “influencers” of a democratic revolution. What’s been called a “woke”state of mind has become a joke but we do need to “wake” from the idiotictrance social mind control has put us under. And anyway, “woke” is past tense.We need to “wake” to reality in the present or there may not be a past tenseavailable to us, here or elsewhere.

 

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U.S. Policy Has Always Been To "Win" Nuclear War - Ellsberg

 "The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets including command and control, many in or near cities. The declared official rationale for such a system has always been primarily the supposed need to deter - or if necessary respond to - an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack - or responding to such an attack - has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them - U.S. threats of 'first use' - to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies."

-------Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, p. 12

On A Rainy Night Where Cotton Was Still King

April 3, 1968 - Memphis

In town to help striking Memphis garbage workers, an exhausted and downcast Dr. King is already in his pajamas when the call comes in from Reverend Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people have braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. "I really think you should come down," Abernathy pleads. "The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd." 

Dr. King gets dressed and goes out into the stormy night. 

In the blaze of lights at the podium he appears nervous. He tells his audience that if he were at God's side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his 95 theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt navigating his way to the New Deal. But he would not dally in any of these times or places, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: We want to be free. 

Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, is deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heap his life with hardship. 

With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellows that he has been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he declares that longevity has its place, but that on this night he is not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declares his last will and testament.

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!" 

 

April 4, 1968 - Death of a Prophet 

The bullet explodes into his face, severs his spine, and brings Dr. King crashing down, down down, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. 

Reverend Abernathy bolts to his side, calling out to those in the parking lot below. 

"Oh my God, Martin's been shot!"

Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutches uselessly at his throat. His head lies in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tries to comfort him. 

"This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don't be afraid."

Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, cannot answer. His mouth quivers once and then Abernathy feels he is communicating through his eyes. 

In King's motel room, the Reverend Billy Kyle bangs his head against the wall again and again, screaming into the telephone for an operator. 

Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young gropes for a pulse.

He screams: "Oh, my God, my God. it's all over."

American cities begin to burn.

 

Excerpt From The Speech That Got Dr. King Killed: 

"The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children roamed the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our latest weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe's concentration camps?

" . . . we have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force - the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!"

 

-----Dr. Martin Luther King, New York City, April 4, 1967

Source for above material:

--------Michael K. Smith, Portraits of Empire

 

Americans Increasingly Enslaved Electronically - Russian Bots Not Involved

 " . . . we have invited into our homes powerful, seductive entities designed to generate profits by monopolizing our attention. And they don't give a damn about our family relations or our children's wellbeing. Unlike a cigar, which is sometimes just a cigar, our smartphones are not just machines. They are conduits for tech companies to surveil and mold our behavior - kind of like alluring, fun, charming, endlessly engrossing, and benign-seeming corporate spies who are expert at insinuating themselves into our lives and manipulating us to their own ends. We take them to dinner, on vacations, to the park with our kids, and to bed. We ask their advice, rely on them for information, and count on them to calm our kids down or to keep them entertained. While appearing to serve us, the real mission for smartphones is to serve us and our children up to advertisers to generate corporate profits. In other words, corporations have figured out how to infiltrate and monetize family life, and we pay them to do it."

-----Susan Linn, Who's Raising The Kids - Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children, p. 131

Worse Than Trump: The Invasion of Iraq Twenty Years On

     "The hypocrisy in . . . . the Bush administration's overall national security strategy - is monumental. If having weapons of mass destruction and a history of using them is a criteria, then surely the United States must pose the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed . . . While the U.S. is massively expanding its biological weapons research capabilities - for example by upgrading its bioresearch facilities at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs to aerosolize live anthrax and genetically modify bio-organisms - it is blocking a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow international inspectors into U.S. facilities." 

---------Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation

    "There are well over 90 UN Security Council resolutions that are currently being violated by countries other than Iraq. The vast majority of these resolutions are being violated by allies of the United States that receive U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support. Indeed, the U.S. has effectively blocked the UN Security Council from enforcing these resolutions against its allies." 

-----Stephen Zunes, Associate Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco

    "In his [President Bush's] speech to the nation on Oct. 7, he said 'America is a friend of the people of Iraq.' Try telling that to a friend of mine in Baghdad who walked out of his house following a U.S. bomb attack to find his neighbor's head rolling down the street; or to a taxi driver I met whose four-year-old child shook uncontrollably for three days following Clinton's 1998 'Monicagate' bombing diversion. Try telling it to the mother of Omran ibn Jwair, whom I met in the village of Toq al-Ghazzalat after a U.S. missile killed her 13-year-old son while he was tending sheep in the field. Try telling it to the hundreds of mothers I have seen crying over their dying babies in Iraqi hospitals, and to the hundreds of thousands of parents who have actually lost their infant children due to the cruel U.S. blockdade, euphemistically called 'sanctions.'"

-----James Jennings, President, Conscience International 

". . . the establishment of the 'no-fly zones' violated Iraq's sovereignty, something explicitly guaranteed by every Security Council resolution on Iraq. The infiltration of spies into Unscom . . . was a further violation of the inspections process - and among the information they collected was anything that could help target Saddam Hussein for assassination, in violation of both international law and domestic executive order . . . . the U.S. used (weapons) inspections explicitly to provoke crises . . . ."

-----Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism

    " . . . a unilateral attack by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq without further authorization from the Security Council would still remain illegal and therefore constitute aggression. In recognition of this fact, British government officials are already reportedly fearful of prosecution by the International Criminal Court. And the Bush Jr. administration is doing everything humanly possible to sabotage the ICC in order to avoid any prospect of ICC prosecution of high-level U.S. government officials over a war against Iraq. Lawyers call this 'consciousness of guilt.'"

----Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois, College of Law

    "Claims of a threat posed by Iraq to international peace and security are entirely untenable. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet refuted Bush's claims in a letter to the Senate, where he said clearly the threat of an Iraqi WMD attack was virtually nonexistent, except possibly in the eventuality of a U.S. war for 'regime change.' Nobody claims Iraq has nuclear weapons, nobody has produced any evidence that Iraq is capable of weaponizing biological agents, and it's quite clear that Iraq can have no more than a nominal chemical weapons capability."

----Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism

    " . . . the U.S. government has repeatedly stated that it would continue the economic sanctions even if Iraq were to fully comply with the weapons inspectors. This means the U.S. policy over the last decade gave a disincentive for Iraqi compliance with the weapons inspectors and ensured an indefinite continuation of the devastating economic sanctions with no legitimate cause."

-----Sam Husseini, Communications Director, Institute For Public Accuracy

    "Although it's true that Iraq has repeatedly restricted access, its degree of compliance is very high - far higher than the compliance of most nations with regard to binding decisions like Security Council resolutions or judgments of the International Court of Justice. Israel, for example, is in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions with no attempt at progress toward compliance. The United States vetoes Security Council resolutions directed against it, as it did with a resolution against its invasion of Panama, and it completely ignored a ruling by the International Court of Justice to cease its terrorist operations against Nicaragua and to pay $17 billion in restitution."

----Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism

    "Language finding Iraq already in 'material breach' and being given 'a final opportunity' to come clean is a rather ominous way of predetermining the outcome . . ."

-----James Jennings, President, Conscience International

    "We must not forget what this [UN Security Council Resolution 1441] does not do. It does not authorize the United States to go to war against Iraq. Despite claims to the contrary by the United States, that can only happen by means of a second resolution. The UN Charter requires specific and unambiguous authorization for the use of force; it is for the Security Council and not the United States to decide the consequences of any failure to implement resolutions."

----Michael Ratner, President, Center For Constitutional Rights

    "Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in twenty years. It has scuppered the biological weapons convention while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories, and has destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections in Iraq. It has ripped up the antiballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the nuclear test ban treaty. It has permitted CIA hit squads, to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. It has sabotaged the small arms treaty, undermined the international criminal court, refused to sign the climate change protocol and, last month, sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture."

                --------George Monbiot, The Guardian

    "All he [UN weapons inspector Hans Blix] can know is the results (sic) of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction."

-----Richard Perle, Chairman, Defense Policy Board

    "What it would prove would be that the inspection process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis."

----Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on what a lack of evidence of Iraqi WMDs would prove

     "If they [the Iraqis] turn on their radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace . . . . .We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."

-------U.S. Brigadier General William Looney, 1996 

    "Fuck Saddam. We're taking him out."

------President George Bush to Condoleezza Rice

Sources:

General Looney quote: William Blum, Rogue State - A Guide To The World's Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000) p. 159

Zunes quotes from Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, (Common Courage, 2003)

GW Bush quote: Time Magazine, May 13, 2002, "We're Taking Him Out"

Remaining quotes from Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq: What The News Media Don't Tell You, (Context Books, 2003) pps. 5, 51, 54, 71, 97-8, 142-86 passim.

Harriet Tubman Exposed As Vicious Anti-Semite

Failed To Lead A Single Jew To The Promised Land, ADL Fumes

Plans to put Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman on the U.S. $20 bill have been permanently shelved due to her recently uncovered lifelong anti-Semitism, announced Fox Abraham of the Anti-Defamation League.

"It's incredibly bad judgment that she was ever even considered as a candidate," Abraham complained. "They called her 'Moses' but she didn't lift a finger to help the victims of the 1859 Odessa pogrom in Russia, ignoring their plight and continuing to focus laser-like on black people out of pure spite," he added.

"A more vicious hate crime could hardly be imagined."

Psychologists are probing Tubman's history of Jew-hatred to determine where it came from and why it manifested itself in such an ugly manner. Early hints suggest she was angry that Jesus failed to attend his own Bar Mitzvah and took it out on the entire self-chosen master race. Other possibilities include resentment that Mose's wife saved her son from angel attacks by circumcising him, an option that was denied the childless Tubman. 

"It's easy to see how she might have had a - 'What am I - chopped liver?' - relationship with God, says Minister Fairy Jalwell of the Very Reformed Protestant Church.

In the wake of the anti-Semitism charge the U.S. Treasury Department has been bombarded with alternate suggestions for currency changes, including Representative Ilhan - "It's All About The Benjamins" -  Omar for the $100 bill, Joe Biden for the $1 bill (nearly worthless), and, at his own suggestion, Donald Trump for the upcoming trillion dollar bill because, "no one has a bigger bill than me."

-----Michael K. Smith
Legalienation News Bureau 

 

 

Jesus Belatedly Charged With Sexual Assault

World famous feminist lawyer Gloria Allbucks revealed shocking details contained in previously unread biblical blogs from the Dead Ocean Scrolls which show that Mary Magdaline suffered outrageous sexual abuse from Jesus but was too frightened of his power to say anything at the time.

"Now that times have changed and brave people are coming forward we can speak out for her and finally show the world what really went on in the days before TV, the internet and lucrative litigation" said Allbucks, whose press conference was attended by hundreds of elected officials, dozens of papparazzi, several former clergy awaiting trial, and six members of Girl Scouts of America who had come to the wrong press conference. 

Calls for re-crucifixion came from Atheists, Agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Democrats, Republicans, the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Big Brothers of the Rich, while many devout Christians asked  for restraint and listening to both sides before rushing to judgement. Informed that both sides had been dead for thousands of years if they ever existed at all, they urged prayer and that Catholics conduct a second collection for all the suffering children in America's charter schools.

Allbucks said she was dropping her case against statue defilers for their vicious cruelty to animals in removing bird toilets from public places and would put the full force of her skill into this case to finally reveal the untold story of a sexists criminal who fooled the world for far too long.

"When this case is over, things will never be the same for men, women and the other recently discovered sexes", she said.

Several of the elected officials in attendance were later accused of sexually molesting the Girl Scouts in attendance and another lawsuit is expected.

Norman Finkelstein Calls Out Politically Correct Idiocy

 " . . . woke politics and cancel culture are now ubiquitous. Overflowing the walls of the ivory tower, they have saturated the airwaves and social media. Once-serious leftist journalists now refer to 'pregnant people' and 'Latinx' (why would an ethnic group want to sound like a porn site?), while people of color 'experts' seem to spend more time braiding their hair than cracking their books. Every website's become a dating app as professionals list their pronouns beside their names. Whenever I see he/him or she/her I think fuck/you. You must be living an awfully precious life if, amid the pervasive despair of an economy in free fall, your uppermost concern is clinging to your pronouns."

--------Norman Finkelstein, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!

Rejoice Big Brother, Information Superhighway Leads Straight To Censorship Hell

 "Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Select Committee, 

"My name is Matt Taibbi. I've been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment. Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I've had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I'm now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack.

"I'm here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.

"It read: 'Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation . . . was going on at Twitter?'

"A week later, the first of what became known as the 'Twitter Files' reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

"But it wasn't until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the "Files," that we started to grasp the significance of this story.

"The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere. 

"What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

"We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like:

"'Hi team, can we get your opinion on this? This was flagged by DHS':

Or

"'Please see attached report from the FBI for potential misinformation.'

"This would be attached to excel spreadsheet with a long list of names, whose accounts were often suspended shortly after.

"Following the trail of communication between Twitter and the federal government across tens of thousands of emails led to a series of revelations. Mr. Chairman, we've summarized these and submitted them to the committee in the form of a new Twitter Files thread, which is also being released to the public now, on Twitter at @ShellenbergerMD, and @mtaibbi.

"We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation 'requests' from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford's Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.

"A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' or 'malinformation.' The latter term is just a euphemism for 'true but inconvenient.'

"Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.

"Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for 'deamplification' or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

"As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying.

"Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people's last line of defense.

"But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.

"Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.

"Some will say, 'So, what? Why shouldn't we eliminate disinformation?'

"To begin with, you can't have a state-sponsored system targeting 'disinformation' without striking at the essence of the right to free speech. The two ideas are in direct conflict.

"Many of the fears driving what my colleague Michael Shellenberger calls the 'Censorship-Industrial Complex' also inspired the infamous 'Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798.' The latter outlawed 'any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against Congress or the president.'

"Here is something that will sound familiar: supporters of that law hundreds of years ago were quick to denounce their critics as sympathizers with a hostile foreign power, at the time with France. Alexander Hamilton said Thomas Jefferson and his supporters were 'more Frenchmen than Americans.'

Jefferson, in vehemently opposing these laws, said democracy cannot survive in a country where power is given to people 'whose suspicions may be the evidence.' He added:

"'It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism.'

"Jefferson's ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don't mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the 'confidence' to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy.

"This is why 'anti-disinformation' just doesn't work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.

"We just saw this with the Covid lab-leak theory. Many of the institutions we're now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid came from a lab 'disinformation' and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI takes it seriously.

"It's not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we're looking at.

"This is a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.

"For hundreds of years, the thing that's distinguished Americans from all other people around the world is the way we don't let anyone tell us what to think, certainly not the government.

"The First Amendment, and an American population accustomed to the right to speak, is the best defense left against the Censorship-Industrial Complex. If the latter can knock over our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponent left anywhere.

"If there's anything the Twitter Files show, it's that we're in danger of losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.

"Thank you for the opportunity to appear, and I would be happy to answer any questions from the Committee."

-----Matt Taibbi, Statement to House Judiciary Committee, March 9, 2023