Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either YoutubesoundcloudApple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypalpurchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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140 responses to “Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)”

  1. I don’t understand why there isn’t more effort being made to create alternative social networks.

    * * * *
    – Huge business organizations always favor police states and strong central governments. This always happens. Its always happened because that is the most effective way of guaranteeing huge profits for huge business organizations. I don’t know of any exceptions to this pattern.

    * * * *
    – If people want to be free to criticize the government and global corporations, they must create forums that aren’t controlled by globalist corporations.

    – Depending on these global corporations, for communication about organizing opposition to any aspect of globalism, is like heading out to sea in a storm in a leaky, rotten boat.

    * * * *
    – There are 2 separate issues: educating the public, and coordinating opposition. At least with an alternative social network people would be free to organize. Then another method needs to be found for educating the public.

    – The MSM social networks aren’t working anyway because they already shut out the most painful criticism. So yes, the masses are on MSM social networks, but its impossible to reach them there about the most critical truths. The early visions of easily, freely sharing info on the internet are now history. I feel betrayed because I put blood and sweat into that. We need to accept that internet is history, move on, and find solutions that will be effective in the current circumstances.

    – The activists in the 1960’s made a lot of progress with handbills, paper newsletters, and meetings in public places. Once somebody writes an email newsletter, with links to reference material on independent websites, which costs far less to distribute than paper newsletters do, then the email newsletter can be forwarded by anybody to anybody over the internet.

    – The foundation is getting out of your social silo, connecting with a wide range of people, and really listening to them and finding common ground. Once there is common ground, then they will be more inclined to listen to you.

  2. Why, how politically correct, Caitlin. “I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is.”

    You almost seem proud of your ignorance, here. It seems strange that someone who is, essentially, a professional internet researcher (you seem to know a lot about what’s posted in the “MSM”) has never looked into the work of Mr.Icke. And in your oh-so-proper defense of his “right to speak,” you none the less catapult the phrase containing the thread-bare trope that he’s mentally unstable. You should know a little more about how public communications work by this point.

  3. David Icke is not a nutter. His research is deep, and he’s a genuine truth seeker. I don’t agree with all his conclusions, but he’s been right more than wrong. I rate him as a serious journalist, and we’re lucky to have him. Banning him from their platforms just proves to me how much he rattles them. ‘They’ don’t wish anyone to proclaim a different narrative from their own…..about anything ! This is so obvious that banning him becomes a self defeating exercise. In other words I want to follow his work more than ever precisely because they object ! That’s how myopic and clumsy ‘they’ really are.
    Big blundering monopolistic corporations and their deep dark state mates are in a staggering lockstep towards a ravine, and won’t be nimble enough to escape their fall. We have nothing to fear.

  4. On yeah? Well I’m here to tell ya, that I really, really, REALLY wanted to vote for Hillary….but I had to vote for Trump. The names of the other candidates were all written in Cyrillic.
    So there!

    1. Scruples are Russian currency and illegal is a sick bird, da or nyet? 😉

  5. Most human speech is not wisdom. Some is foolishness and some is seduction and coercion.
    The problem, as you point out, is that the billy-club needed to limit speech seems to hammer wisdom and foolishness, but not seduction. Coercion rules. Compliance, compliance, compliance…
    http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/05/simplification.html

    Association of American Physicians and Surgeons announces:
    Hydroxychloroquine Has about 90 Percent Chance of Helping COVID-19 Patients
    https://aapsonline.org/hcq-90-percent-chance/

    ​ Why does this make me think of ​the ​​US government​ wasting 2 months of warning, producing faulty tests, outlawing any other tests, then condemning hydroxychloroquine use and forbidding doctors to prescribe it in some states?
    ​ ​A leaked dossier compiled by Western intelligence agencies concludes that China lied and deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence during the crucial early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, and notes that Chinese researchers have been experimenting with – and creating – deadly bat coronaviruses…
    A key theme of the dossier is that China’s negligence and lies resulted in the “endangerment of other countries,” as the CCP silenced or ‘disappeared’ doctors who spoke out.
    Doctors who bravely spoke out about the new virus were detained and condemned. Their detentions were splashed across the Chinese-state media with a call from Wuhan Police for “all citizens to not fabricate rumours, not spread rumours, not believe rumours.”
    https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/key-findings-leaked-government-dossier-china-bat-virus-program

    1. Calamity Jane Avatar
      Calamity Jane

      What a load of John K Day.
      Its all media spread Chinese whispers.
      Zerohedge and Trump tells us a ” deadly virus exists and maleria drug treats said deadly virus”
      What baalievers.
      In the church of pseudoscience . The Atheist’s religion. Don’t be a denier.
      And the China nationalizing meme again “oh evil China oh evil US and good Russians”.

  6. Roundball Shaman Avatar
    Roundball Shaman

    The Internet will soon be a completely useless platform. Tech giants and those who support and benefit from them will not stop until they have completely transformed the Net into a fully propagandized sewage transmission line. The 21st Century version of book-burning and witch-burning will continue until all free or divergent (from the Authorized Line) points of view have been eliminated.

    Then, the concept of Free Thinking itself will be expunged from society as it will become viewed as being in bad taste or dangerous. Future generations will not want or miss the idea of free expression because they will never have experienced it and won’t miss it or have any desire for it.

    “Landru, help us!” will never be uttered because all dangerous ideas will have been eliminated from society and all persons as outliers will have been fully “Absorbed”.

    You’re fading away, World Wide Web. We hardly knew ya.

  7. Why aren’t you protesting the lockdown? It’s insane it’s unscientific it a massive theft of wealth from small businesses and landlords and homeowners s a pretext for a medical dictatorship.

    Helllooooo???

    1. Calamity Jane Avatar
      Calamity Jane

      Yeah Bob isn’t the home detention we are under the biggest elephant in the room.
      Media has a lot of distractions going to keep the insane population that has ADD mind fed every-time they become disinterested with the latest baloney.
      The Icke story is one, Biden story is another is Assange (poor wee CIa agent).

  8. Censorship is wrong, regardless of who is being censored. It is incompatible with freedom of speech and freedom in general. Yet, because we make sociopaths our leaders, those conniving control-freaks are ALWAYS trying to convince us that censorship is necessary and desirable, because censorship gives them greater power and control over all of us, which is what they ALWAYS want. In other words, censorship benefits them at our expense, because it will ALWAYS be them censoring us.

  9. Dear Caitlin, As always you are in our service and we are in your debt. Please consider my proposals. I know in the past you have discussed how to expand and move into a larger presence, let me put forth a different proposal. Rather than expand in quantity expand in quality, not of your writing but of the format of the comments section. This is truly a valuable space and is such an underutilized asset just about everywhere. They are all the same, comment vertical, no consensus, disappears next week. We ‘the people’ all of us are the force for human good. What if ‘We the people’ were the authority and the authorities/leaders failures that they are were nothing but ancient history, obsolete, relics of an age gone by. Surely in your broad reach there are programmers who could or would help us to create an open source platform for logical and rational consensus. What if the conclusions we formed here were tested, refined and open to critique. They would show us a much clearer picture of the intellectual world we live in. The talking heads, the politicians, the experts could not compete. For how long in this world as it is now can we hold out against the self-serving idealist on the right and the left? As the world is today humans are forced into the religion of their ‘ideas’ it is at times all they see they have. We need to offer them something more. We need to turn the page on the human experience, step into a new world. A new world of ‘Human thought’ as you would say. Thank you again as always.

    https://medium.com/@whmilk/thinking-outside-the-vertical-line-28161b232d64

    https://medium.com/@whmilk/the-value-of-anonymity-in-a-collective-intelligence-c0a003f481b6

    1. What am I talking about? I am just talking about the smallest tweeks, I don’t have 100’s of thousands of dollars to spend on programmers. Besides we are talking about a bag phone here. Who can tell where it will end up. What I am saying is lets just find the resources or the people to make a few small changes. Just to show people that they don’t have to summit their comments their time and energy simply venting. What if we could actually produce something tangible? Say we move fallacies withing comments to the sidebar, to isolate them, People would start to recognize them, learn about them or not use them so much. We would all become more educated on the logic embrace and the way the MSM manipulates us. When we learned to pull out the fallacies then we could work on the rational, the logic. Once People realize that hey we don’t have to listen to fallaciy infested points of view all day long with no resource to steer us back on course, Once they realize the TPTB rely on these errors to spread their message and we can disrupt their message then what? Once it catches on that no we are not helpless. Once the open source community piles in, everything will change. Imagine an app that could be inserted into any comments section. We need to say yes we believe in humanity, but our logic is flawed and we need help. Modern technology can provide that help.

      1. Consensus of opinions is the ideal goal of serious, honest, informed debate but in practice consensus of opinions is seldom of ever achieved. That is not a problem if we use the Keys of Knowledge as a method of inquiry to sift through all the different opinions and distill out truth from half-truths, lies and ignorance. It takes time to apply this powerful method of inquiry but well worth the effort when important decisions are needed to be based on facts and knowledge. I can tell you more about this excellent method of inquiry if you are interested.

        1. Thank you, but I cannot say I am really interested. Though I believe we are thinking along the same lines, how do you distill out truth? What I see is that there is this very important part of human knowledge – Epistemology, part of philosophy. philosophy of logic that is just laying there dormant and unused. The ‘lies’ are not just lies but ‘errors’ in logic dressed up to look like the truth. The only way I see going forward is a technological platform where we collectively and anonymously work for what is called the ‘justified true belief’. We attempt to ‘reason together’ as they say. I call it Collective Intelligence. I like to think of it as a “Human powered A.I.”

    2. Many thanks for the link through which I discovered Cathlin’s free book viable where we can learn a lot of things

      Posting and reading the comments posted are as useful as the author’s piece
      Especially, often the links

      1. Sorry for the mix up Fauouzi, Thae book is not Caitlin’s. It is a book I wrote several years ago. I should have put more effort into making it happen somehow. I just had to lay it out like I see it. Sad how here we are on the verge of creating quantum computers and annihilating ourselves at the same time. I truly believe that modern technology has opened up an opportunity for us. Thank you for reading. We are humanity.

        1. Thank you Clint for this clarification and your
          pertinent comment too
          That is why I linked
          You must to light your work by linking to Amazon if the book is also available on Amazon website
          I have my books on Amazon.fr
          we should all of us to be indebted to Caitlin’s works and for her informative daily pieces and least but not last for opening a space for fruitful and stimulant discussion

          1. Thank You Faouzi! Take Care

  10. Calamity Jane Avatar
    Calamity Jane

    This is widespread coordinated govt censorship of internet using the excuse of the Christchurch false flag shooting.
    As though mass shootings and drive bys had anything to do with internet.
    They are increasing as the insanity of humanity increases, perpetual wars as a glaring symptom of our lack of inner peace not lack of censorship.

    Maybe people should be asked to question that and the cause for worldwide (govt) censorship.

    *If no one watches Icke in their lifetime they will not miss out on anything they need to know, think or feel.

  11. Dear Caitlin: I am a major fan and almost always totally agree with you! I often post your columns on my FB friend despite some sincere “detractors” who don’t get it about such non-dualities as the Biden/Trump matter. However, I must say that the matter of Free Speech is an extremely important basic issues… I spent time during the 1960s in the midst of Berkeley, California’s Free Speech Movement. I strongly feel about this issue, however there are a few qualifications, especially when an influential person uses a widely viewed platform in order to spread misinformation that endangers and kills people. You admit you don’t know much about David Icke, and to me that’s the flaw in this latest column. IMO he’s functionally insane, a psychopAthic narcissist (sound familiar?) and definitely pushing ideas on the gullible that are costing lives. Of course, the problem with a Public Citizen such as Ralph Nader is that he protects people from themselves, but then sometimes it seems worthwhile to pre-empt the damage of serious life-threatening misinformation. Some years ago I checked out Icke’s books and videos… there are striking illustrations in the books, but the texts are paranoid manic diarrhea and range from innocuous fantasy to dangerous racist and nihilist ideologies to truly bizarre schizophrenic delusions. My friend in the UK watch him go from pompous and vain to apparently psychotic during his career as a broadcaster there. Though I understand the crucial important of free speech and how seriously censorship can be used for thought control, it[s a bit like the fact the Secret Service must take verbal death threats seriously. There are lines that cannot be crossed in terms of social responsibility without raising red flags. Regardless, I love you and respect you and very much appreciate your brilliant ongoing contributions to current dialogue on the state of the world. You are one of the few voices I most often agree with. So, Right On, Sister! Peace, Bruce P. Grether

    1. what are you talking about you complete moron?
      Your assessment is utter shite!
      Suggest you get aff the tenner bags (ten pound bags of smack for those outwith the West of Scotland) ya fanny!

      As my Granny used to say…..haud yer wheesht on things you onviously know nothing about

  12. when i went to the neuro to see about my brain they gave me a test…really a battery of tests.
    i had a concussion from being hit by a car. yep. shit happens. luckily i was hit by my own car because i was driving staright ahead when a left turner blasted me from the side. my left front side window frame knocked me out.
    months later i wanted them to tell me how long this absetn minded orofessor was gonna be conttllinng my mind…ie., bakc ot the future. duh who? me?
    and so i got there on timme at 9:15 for a 9:30 APPT. they called me in at 10:30. AM. and i waited patiently another 20 minutes in a tiny room for “testing.” finally this quite young pretty young thing walked in saying her cheerleader best HI! how are you today.?
    i’m pissed i said. but i’m OK. hit me with yer best shot.
    she proceeded to unveil a battery of tests tht in 2 hours made me tremble. and i put my head down on my hands elbows on my knees. and almost cried. the room was silent.
    i stifled my tears as they were only of relief. it was ove. and more wilence. then i finally looked up and asked her. well, how did i do? she seemed surprised….and i repeated the Big Q. i was thinking ABCDorF…and then she smiled sort of shyly and said “You were normal to the test.”

    i kinda choked on that one. i said, “There was nothing normal about this test, from being here clear across town in a hospital and taking this stupid test to be normal to, because the test is ABNORMAL!”
    “It might also help if you were on time,” i added.
    and i stumbled outa there talking to myself.
    Ask Nagasaki if the war was normal. Ask Vietnam if Agent Orange is normal ask Iraqi mothers if undepleted uranium bullets ask MLK, JFK, RFK or Malcom X families…, or Dick Cheney if running the Norad from his Vice Presidential of his pants was normal. or if those 152 children we kille last wednesday i Afghanistan was normal…to the test.
    ask the 1,000 shot dead black men AND boyz every year, do their mommies think that is normal….what are they escaped slaves?!
    man i hope this Miss Johnstone IS NORMAL and more of those like her were normal and this comment forum is guaranteed normal and all who come here have the feeling they can actually SPEAK normally here….forever normal.

  13. In the American Southeast, there are laws against wearing masks in public. These laws date back to the days of trying to stomp out the violent terrorist group known as the Ku Klux Klan. People hid their identities behind white masks while performing acts like cross burning, beatings, torture and murder.
    As anti-war and anti-globalization protests bloomed, these laws were resurrected and used against protesters. The police had begun filming the identities of protesters. This was before widespread computer facial recognition, but the police used old-fashioned eye-ball facial recognition to identify protesters and build data on who opposed banks and war.
    Now people are encouraged to wear masks in public.
    That can be a good thing.
    Now you can try to defeat at least some of the facial recognition systems in use. You can wear a mask to a protest, legally. You can defeat the systems that identify customers as they shop via facial recognition by wearing a mask. Since this virus is going to be with us for awhile, it will be quite some time before you’ll be told that you can no longer wear that mask in public.

  14. Also, Facebook and Youtube do the exact same thing, in the exact same way, every time somebody calls out a false flag or a western sanctioned terrorist operation (let’s not kid ourselves, if every idiot on the idiot box spends weeks and weeks trying to terrify us, over some terrifying thing, then it was an act of terrorism, and they are likely in on it).

    1. Or, just cashing in on making money by being able to attract gullible eyeballs to their screens. Back as far as Daddy Bush’s Iraq War, the networks loved war as it jacked up their ratings on their news shows. CNN et al love it when they get a new crisis.
      Why let more people in on the secret when you can count on their own self-interest making them do what you want?

  15. Facebook is an intel service backed mass surveillance and human interaction dynamics analytical/manipulation tool whick is literally run by the enemies of humanity (with huge and very nearly AI level supercomputer/server centers).
    Boycott, Divest, Sanction.
    Youtube is quite similar, only it is geared more towards outright consciosness programming (courtesy of the same group of circus clowns, by the way).
    Boycott, Divest, Sanction.
    DC (which apparently thought all of this was just a stupendously splendid idea) is a massive negative energy nexus/fortress/control center for the evil empire (quite literally). Which, of course, is brought to us by the very same group of ‘whatever the hell they ares’ (which are pretending to be members of the human species).
    Boycott, Divest, Sanction.
    I really do believe that if these walking, talking trash cans fail to recieve any of our energy at all, for even one day, we may very well find that they are simply no longer with us by the next day.

    1. At this point, I understand being on Facebook if you want to promote yourself or a cause. There’s a crowd there, so if your goal is to shout at the crowd, I can understand using it.
      But why on earth any normal human being is still on Facebook is beyond me?
      By now, it is not news that they censor what you see.
      By now it is not news that the spy on you. In fact, this was always its design. Both Facebook and Google make their money by selling information on what you do.
      Perhaps the surveilence would be acceptable if either was a good source of information, but their censorship destroys even that.
      So, since people know that what they see on these corporate channels is censored and manipulated to steer them, and since people know that they are being monitored and everything they do is going into Big Data …….. why are people who know these things sill on FB or Google?
      It is quite easy to leave. When you do it, you only wonder why you didn’t do it long before. It is quite possible to keep FB and Google and the rest out of your lives.
      PS … you’ll want to block both those like “post on FB” icons, and also any Google cookies from your browser. Both track you. There are plugins like NoScript that let you block what you choose, and others that make sure cookies don’t linger and track you. At the least, you can set your browser to delete cookies when you close it, then remember to close it when you are done and not let it sit in the background. And do you really need to keep a browser history?

  16. Observation: Our readily available forms and variety of chosen entertainments are increasingly being diminished by the providers of such entertainment. Those in control apparently fail to appreciate any competition which effectively cuts into their desired narratives and scheduled timelines. Speculation is also warranted that some of the control group’s senior members are rapidly approaching an assumption of room temperature but first desire to see the culmination of their lifelong ecumenical efforts. The once open range is thus being fenced and cross-fenced as the sheep are funneled into whatever final destination awaits. As these senior members continue to pass, however, the younger control group members will most likely rationalize the rescheduling of things – simply because that is the more entertaining choice.

    1. Of late, each generation of leaders and assorted minions is worse than the ones before. Much of what you see in politics and corporate leadership would have been considered obscene behavior and not accepted just a few generations ago.
      Each generation watches and learns from its elders. Then they want to prove their worth by showing that they can go even further. This can be a good thing if it goes in a positive direction. Or it can lead to the doomsday clock now needing to be specified in how many seconds remain until we are all doomed.

  17. Gene MacLellan Avatar
    Gene MacLellan

    I admire your work, but have a serious question.

    A great number of alternative news media who are concerned with the the truth are “preaching to the choir”. The majority of these recipients are well aware of the psychopathic charismatic politicians who are bamboozling, fear mongering, and falsely placating the apathetic majority of the populace. These ignorant people, chimpanzees, as coined by Doug Casey, are not concerned with the Constitution, nor the Bill of Rights. They are misdirected by the news media and spiffy dressed politicians, who they believe as their savior for supervision and guidance to the “Promised Land.” These false promises are controlled an apathetic greed for power and wealth by the banking elite and their cronies.

    My question is: “How do we solve or circumvent this catastrophic situation?”

    1. In America, it has always been a powerful position for a politician to argue for change. So much so that even incumbents usually seem to promise change.
      My view of American politics is that for some time its has been full of a lot of dry timber and ready for a wildfire.
      For instance, we saw that with the Obama Change and Hope campaign. Yes, it was a lie from an Ivy League hustler working for the banks. But, the popular reaction showed how powerful that promise was.
      We saw it again during the Occupy Wall St protests, which were really starting to take off when Obama and the Dem governors and Dem mayors sent in the storm troopers to break them up. Again, this shows the extent of the dry timber.
      In many ways, we saw it again with the Trump campaign. All of those voices in the news media and all of those spiffy dressed politicians were united in saying Vote for Hillary. But ….
      Revolutions are curious things. Nobody ever sees them coming. Not the vanguards who see themselves as the leaders of the new movement, not the police and spies nor the politicians. Everyone is always surprised when they begin. But, what you can notice is that there is an abundant amount of dry timber laying around ready to ignite.
      As to what will ignite it … that’s the part that always surprises everyone.

  18. It is without doubt, censorship in the so called liberal democracy seems to be manifestly at odds with liberal tradition going back to bourgeois American and French revolutions(between 1776,1789) and to their Declarations of the rights of Man proclaiming the free speech and Freedom of thought, as two fondamental rights that must be protected by the State and inserted in the future constitutions.

    One can remind free speech and freedom of thought were used by capitalist liberal “democracy” in general and the USA in the aftermath of the WWII, in the framework of Truman Doctrine in 1947 aiming at fighting communism all over the world in the name of “American way of life” as ideological weapon against the USSR and socialist bloc, equaling them, by Lockian association of ideas and Pavlovia, conditioned reflex, to dictatorship and synonymous with Goulag and persecution of dissidents.

    In reply to western arguments on free speech and freedom of thought, Soviet and socialist propaganda argued that before allowing to express their thought, there are some basic needs to be meet and addressed, related to instinctive and biological priorities to be satisfied. The most urgent thing to do, the people must before and almost be feed, be housed and be given a work allowing them to live and to be educated. This objective must be reached thanks to what we can call the planification or planified economy. Once such basic needs being satisfied, the people can be allowed to express their thought.
    This is the theory and is’t the place to go further, to discuss it and to refute it

    the deep seated idea that in the capitalist West, there are frre speech and freedom of thought and after all opinion diversity in contrast to authoritarian and dictatorial communist model where there is but unique party propaganda is throughout cliches and stereotypes comparing the free speech and freedom of thought between capitalist and socialists models is totally biased by western propaganda propagating cliches and stereotypes among public opinions in the West.

    It is true that the capitalist and liberal world, there are myriad of outlets, of “news”, of radio and TV networks, but to contrary to conventional wisdom, such proliferation of “news” outlets are controlled by handful of billionaires(15 in the USA and 9 in France). Those mainstream outlets play key role six months before each general election and especially presidential election in the election of the president, like FOX News in the election of Trump or BFMTV and Cnews in the election of an unknown and obscur candidate, Macron in France. Instead of having one Pravda before the sabotage of socialist system in the USSR, in the capitalist World, what the leverage man ignores, that there are myriad of PRAVDA, the mouthpiece of big capital. After all, contrary to misleading appearances, the free speech and freedom of thought are self delusion, on account of the fact the intellectual power in capitalist world is monopolized by big corporations controlling the people thanks to their holding their grip on mass media, edition, academic publication etc

    The result of the control of intellectual power by the capital, supported by its subservient government, there is no alternative, the infamous Thatcher’s TINA, to current greed and deadly system as long as a handful of powerful corporations continue to dominate the whole intellectual sphere.
    The advent of internet opened a breach and contributed of course to undermine in some extent the grip of corporations on the intellectual power but unfortunately it will not be suffisant to create a powerful and irresistible popular resistance so as to threaten so far the backgrounds of the system and to radically transform it into something new and totally different from the old one.

    The current coronavirus crisis is the appropriate occasion to help tip the balance and accelerate the movement towards a new world and a new system getting rid of human enslavement and the man’s exploitation of man.

    1. Six months before the election of Donald Trump, Fox News was opposed to him.
      All during the primaries, Fox favored candidates such as Jeb Bush or Cruz or Rubio.
      It was only after the convention (2-3 months before election day) that Fox started to back Donald.
      For those that decry how powerful the media is at controlling people’s minds, well they probably should study the Trump campaign up till it got the nomination. Of course, it helped to be a billionaire with resources with a few other key billionaires such as the guy behind Breitbart. But still, that was a campaign that ran largely against all of the powerful media, and thus operated outside of them.
      The very presence of Donald Trump in the White House, as much as it makes me want to puke, also shows that this powerful media machine can be beaten.

    2. Remember, the people who tell you that the media is all powerful is …. the media.
      When you turn them off, certain thoughts begin to disappear from your head. One of them is that the media is all powerful.
      For instance, they tried to defeat the growing Occupy Wall Street movement by using the media. That didn’t work, and Obama had to resort to the classic old stand-by of police in riot gear carrying clubs.

      1. The strength of mass media is not at all a science fiction
        The strength of mass media is shown through both the period preceding each election and the result of the brain washing of millions of voters who fall into a trap : electoral mascarade organized at Olympic intervalle
        We are the latest example of the strength of mass media with the elimination, throwing off and putting out of the game of Bernie Sanders

        We have another example of the omnipotence of mass media in France when they were fabricating out of nothing a candidate, former banker working for Rothschild, becoming president of the French Republic Macron. I observed during the six months preceding the presidential election, the techniques and methods deployed by the mass media in France, controlled by 9 billionaires, in order to make very easy Macron’s election opposing the far right candidate Marine Le Pen who becomes the life insurance of acting president

  19. Ms Johnstone this magnificent article really moved me: Exerps:
    Are you prepared for the “new normal”?
    What likely awaits us after the “reopening” of society is not going to be acceptable to people who still have a basic sense of justice and dignity.
    When we recall the great militant labor movement of the 19th and early 20th century, we did not see people afraid of being fired. They went on strike. They were not afraid of being shot and killed. Because the conditions they faced were worse than death. They had nothing to lose.
    It is civilizations duty to entice us, to seduce us into its fold. It must somehow offer something better for us than what we could do on their own. That is the real essence of the social contract. When all the “dangers” that society protects us from are increasingly just the dangers that society itself poses, what we have entered into is slavery.
    If society has successfully gas-lit us into thinking that it is we who wanted and needed society, and not the other way around, then we have already lost.
    To win the fight against their version of a “4th Industrial Revolution”, means knowing first and foremost that we do not need most of what society today has to offer, and would rather die free than live as slaves. That is the power to walk away.
    Please read this magnificent article here:
    Capitalism After Corona Lockdown: Having the Power to Walk Away
    Joaquin Flores!
    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/03/capitalism-after-corona-lockdown-having-the-power-to-walk-away/

  20. Tue Sorensen Avatar
    Tue Sorensen

    I’m sorry, but there is a disconnect here, in the principle of it. And I believe this is the first time I am disagreeing with you, Caitlin.

    The idea of celebrating people’s right to say things that you wildly disagree with is, ultimately, neither rational nor morally right. Not if you believe in a good and social human nature that can and ultimately should live harmonically in a society governed by far-left ideals. If you know that oppression is bad and unjust, you should not celebrate and champion somebody’s right to say – or behave as if – it is good and right. Oppression is absolutely a morally bad thing. If you do not believe in your own ability to understand right from wrong, and to understand when someone is being oppressed (which in many ways is the very understanding that your entire blogging career is based on), it is comparable to your watching an innocent person being beaten or killed, and just reacting with, “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing, so I shouldn’t do anything about it!” It is comparable to your being too morally wishy-washy to decide for certain that OPPRESSION IS BAD, full stop!

    If you can tell when something bad is bad, and good is good, then you should also fight to see more good and less bad done, even if it means censoring the voices and actions of the hateful, the oppressive and the stupid. That will be a net good which is greater/better than if you don’t do it. And how is it different from all the rest of our struggles to make a better world? I assume a lot of neo-Nazi groups are already censored from Facebook and Youtube. This case is absolutely no different. Icke and Jones deserve every bit as much to be banned.

    Now, what ELSE exactly is being censored is a different question. Everything always depends on the specific circumstances. By and large, we, the people, have always been extensively censored, so for social media to censor horrid people like Icke and Jones indeed IS cause for celebration – it’s a tiny nudge in the opposite direction. Far-right nutcases being removed and gelded. Again, who else are being censored is another question. Let’s find out some more about that, and talk again. I am as worried as you about that. It may well be true that they have publicized the censoring of Icke and Jones just to con people into cheering for the overall censorship program, which of course is concerning. But as always, we need to know more in order to have any hope of glimpsing the truth.

    1. “If you can tell when something bad is bad, and good is good, then you should also fight to see more good and less bad done, even if it means censoring the voices and actions of the hateful, the oppressive and the stupid.” This statement, the core of your argument as I read it, is a totally subjective noose with which to hang Icke, or Jones, or Trump, or Johnstone, or Assange, or Thunberg. It is noteworthy that the bible allegorically describes the fall of mankind as the result of having eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

    2. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
      R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

      And thus did the heroic ideals of a revolution devolve into Stalinism. Whenever anyone sets themselves up as the ultimate arbiter of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, freedom of speech no linger exists.

      One would presume that the ‘bad’ people that Mr. Sorensen would censor because they ‘deserve’ to be censored, might feel that THEY are being “oppressed”. Ahh … But Mr. Sorensen thinks he has the right to define ‘oppression” according to his own subjective point of view.

      Definitions are EXTREMELY hard to discern from any “objective” perspective. Killing innocent people to further a political objective, for example, is ‘bad’. No? But one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another person’s ‘freedom fighter’.

      In the classic movie “The Battle of Algiers’, which depicted the revolt of the Algerians against French Colonial rule, the ‘freedom fighters’ did use ‘terrorism’. They disguised attractive women as colonialists to cross checkpoints hiding bombs in their purses, which they planted in places in the French sector, (such as an ice cream shop, in which a young girl was shown licking an ice cream cone immediately before the blast detonated).

      The rebels held a press conference, and when they were challenged and castigated for using such heinous tactics as “delivering bombs in ladies’ purses”. Their answer was “you French are using jet planes to drop bombs on our families in our homes, killing OUR children. Give us your jet planes and bombs, and we’ll gladly trade our ladies’ purses in exchange”.

      Terrorism is ‘bad’, but one person’s ‘terrorist’ is another person’s ‘freedom fighter’.

      There is speech that is recognized as ‘bad’, and not protected by freedom of speech. Shouting fire in a crowded theater, to deliberately cause a panicked stampede that would cause people to be trampled to death, is a classic example, as is inciting people to violence, such as “let’s go break into the jailhouse and grab the the inmate and lynch him”, etc.

      The thing is, those are the ‘easy’ cases. Oppression? Much harder to define. I’m sure that Alex Jones, whom you say deserved to be censored, thinks he has a right to freedom of speech. I don’t like him much myself, (and I’ve actually had a personal confrontation with him), but I think some of what he has to say is interesting, and that everything he has to say should certainly be covered under Voltaire’s premise: “I despise what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

      So … You think it is self-evident he should be censored, I think censoring him would be “oppression” of his right to free speech.

      Applying any definition, whether of ‘hate speech’, or ‘oppression’, or whatever, comes down to ‘drawing a line’, and someone setting themselves up as the arbiter to decide who or what falls on which side of that line.

      You seem to glibly assume that YOU will both fashion the definitions, and also will be the arbiter to apply the definitions you fashion. So why isn’t it OK for Mark Zuckerberg to assume that HE should make the definitions and be the arbiter?

      1. Tue Sorensen Avatar
        Tue Sorensen

        To all who replied to my comment: You are trained to think of good and bad as subjective things, but ultimately they aren’t. Positive and negative emotion have objective substance, so it should be very clear from a good person’s point of view that physical, financial, social and lethal oppression of innocent ordinary people is bad by any moral standard. It is apparent that you can’t follow my thinking, but I am merely doing my best to be scientific, and to take the consequence of the far-left idea that human nature is good, and that our behavior toward each other should be loving and cooperative. This means that we must see good human morals as an objective thing, and design our policies accordingly. I realize that there is no accepted scientific proof of this yet, but it is the same set of assumptions that Karl Marx proceeded from more than 150 years ago. He was ahead of the bourgeois science of his day, and much of Marxist theory still is. Those who endeavor to think scientifically and apply their scientific knowledge to the human mind, have a chance of seeing this, esp. because a lot of modern science supports his view. But I understand that few or none will take my word for it. This is something you have to develop your political philosophy quite far in order to conclude. Good luck, folks. Catch you on the other side.

        1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
          R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

          Thank you so much for letting us know, Mr. Sorensen, that we all are but ill-trained beasts in the face of your infinitely superior wisdom and knowledge. Woe be to us if people of your ilk again gain power, as they did in the USSR, where they sent people into the gulag to learn that people like you are the fount of all wisdom, and anyone who disagrees must be silenced, or even killed. How many millions do you figure Stalin killed, to prove his superior grasp of right and wrong, good and bad?

          I take it you’re planning to seize power through violence, as the bolsheviks did, since no one would ever vote for you, because we are all too ill-trained to recognize your superiority to us all.

          Of course, after they seized power, the bolsheviks soon split into factions, each of which thought exactly like you, (that they alone were the fount of wisdom), so they started killing each other to prove that their way was the be-all and end-all of knowledge and wisdom.

          Thank you for commenting, to remind us of one of the greatest evils, people who think like you, that we are struggling to get humanity past.

          1. Tue Sorensen Avatar
            Tue Sorensen

            Wow. And what is YOUR ideology, pray? You don’t seem like much of a leftist, so why are you even here?

            In any case, I shan’t encourage or engage you any further; you already have far too many confused comments on this post. Comments in which you educate everyone about how right you are. Your attitude is no different from mine.

            1. Guardians of established morality are always evil oppressors who burn the prophets and radical truth-tellers at the stake.

        2. You are a very faulty, (fallacy prone) thinker. 1. “Trained”, prove it. 2. “Subjective” this is just how you apply human logic, How do we apply it? 3. Emotions are just reactions to stimulus, may have underlying rational, but not rational itself. 4. “Good person” what is a good person and are they good (unselfish) all or most of the time. 5 “oppression” intellectual like you want or physical? 6 “Moral standard” What standard, your opinion. 7. “Scientific” you just mentioned “emotional” 8. “Loving and cooperative” should be, could be, has been at times. Long term need to look at history and where we are now is a product of that history up to this point. 9. “objective thing, and design our policies accordingly” Objective? You mean your opinion. This is idealistic and has societal influences ( which is or can be a large negative), You just want the power to play God. 10. “bourgeois science of his day” meant to impress, meaningless. 11.”Scientifically” you continually mix scientifically with objective perspectives. Ridiculous. 12. “This is something you have to develop your political philosophy quite far in order to conclude. Good luck, folks. Catch you on the other side.” Toot your own horn, congratulate yourself, conduct your own experiment with no oversight, prove your own hypothesis without a thread of evidence, Job well done.

        3. pseudo-intellectual pish!

    3. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis

      Tue Sorensen, did you ever hear the saying about ROAD TO HELL PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS?? Your “thinking” about “good and social human nature… in a society governed by far-left” could be pardoned as just SADLY MISTAKEN, if it wasn’t so SCARY.

    4. For background, I am an Independent who served as a State delegate for Ron Paul two election cycles. (fundamentally anti-war, Iraq war, anti-fed, over reaching Gov.) He was totally done in Bernie style by the RNC, Fox new and all ‘Conservative’ power centers, I refused to vote as a Republ. For McCain and Romney. Background that really shouldn’t matter, but there it is. Here I am reading a ‘liberal’ and sending her stories to family members even though in principle, because of the 2nd Amend I would never vote for a Liberal. Furthermore her stories are often posted on alternative media, which is in essence Independent media Because there are some very crucial points she gets Very right. So please let me explain why you are Very wrong.

      First you have to look at humanity as a ‘whole’ we are intelligent creatures whose main source of ‘power’ is our intellect and we deploy this in a ‘rational’ and ‘logical’ manner, in theory. Perfect rational, and logic employed in the most virtuous manner is what we call ‘God – like’ and there is the problem. We like to attribute aspects of something we don’t understand, the spiritual God world of destiny and fate, time flowing back and forth, all seeing, all knowing, perfectly rational and logical to ‘individual’ people much like us, 95% like us walking around here on Earth just like us among us.
      Is this wrong? Yes it is. Human ‘intellect’ as powerful as it is ( quantum theory, math, physics) still works with rational and logical wheels within the time piece to make the hands move. No clock keeps perfect time as we know. Also it as Einstein’s relativity, the man on the train and the man standing on the station watching the train have two different perspectives. We are creatures of perspective.

      To make a long story short, Human logic and rational is ‘fractured’ not one person or group of persons, |”far-left ideas” as you said; has the entire picture, works perfect logic. No one is God. The idea of ‘Authority’ is a tainted idea based on an idealism filling a void of perceived and real need. Sometimes you just need a strong ‘Leader’ faults and all. In honesty this is the history of humankind, we depend on ‘Leader’. That is our legacy. That has to change because it is a tainted idea, whose utility has become outdated.

      What you have said is nothing more than a variation and continuation of this theme.

      Furthermore when you start down the slippery slope of Determining ‘Authority’ authority becomes a placeholder for rational and logic. What happens, bad things. Why? Because the foundation is now something other that logic and rational and we build on ‘shifting sand’ as they say. A foundation of ‘Authority’ and all the pretense and human sociological entrappments that now support and uphold it for the progression of time (future, how lazy we are). Lead to the la la land we now find ourselves in and that Caitlin so dutifully writes about day after day.

      Where you make your first set of errors (fallacies) is where you equate Intellectual oppression with physical oppression. You somehow want ot extrapolate the world of thought into a scary vision of physical abuse. Which often works very well. You even go so far to write the words “beaten and killed” in context of in your argument about “rationality an morality”. I already don’t trust you, and if I could write a Bill of Rights to protect myself from you that is what I would have done. Which is exactly why we have a Bill of Rights. It is my protection as an equal, in perception an cognition of what is rational and logical against your abuses of logic in support of your ordained ‘Authority’.

      These are also contextual protections. When you say things like “harmonically is a society governed” that really sums up all your faults. 1. “Harmonically” is an idea whose time has not come, which has never in human history been the dominating or factory programmed setting if you may. Human history is of chaos, war and it you look today there is a clock ticking down our demise because, we can just never overcome or base functions and they destroy the thing we need most, logic and rational.

      2. Society, if there is one thing that has totally played against us it is sociological forces. If you want to understand anything going on in the world today then understand sociology. It is the force that totally annihillates human logic and rational. See those people standing around getting ready to burn Fred alive because the big men ‘authorities’ say he is most definitely a werewolf and the hair on his neck, arms and body prove it. Not to mention he spends too much time walking around at night. Not very different that Trump is a Russian asset. Sociology allows Individuals within it to play upon it’s soft foundations.

      3. You use the word ‘governed’ well I have already addressed that. You use words, “If you can tell when something bad is bad, and good is good,” which considering the ‘fracturing’ of human logic, the shifting sand of ‘Authority’ and the negative forces of ‘Society’ this is an absolutely Ridiculous statement. No one has that perfect perspective, perfect rational execution, not to mention the individual biases and needs and wants which we haven’t even mentioned. And you voiced this non-sense with seemingly your intellectual stamp of approval and an honest appraisal. Do you see what the problem is here?

      And what about those “Neo-Nazis”? What do you really know about them? I bet there are fifty shades of grey. I bet many organizations including the Democratic party have fifty shades of gray,(antifa anyone). What I see is an Idealogical movement much less dangerous than your. Yes they have the potential for violence, then so do you. ( police, enforcement of your ideas) and they presently are not attempting to censor me. What about their ideas? Perhaps they may even add a perspective if you listened, If you were allowed to listen. Do they like the Jews, no. Is this stereotyping yes. Perhaps if we listened but did not join, because we don’t have to. We might gain a new perspective on the influence of the Israeli lobby on the wars in the Mid-East where millions of people have actually had their lives destroyed and died.

      Afraid?, that is really what it boils down to. We don’t have to fear the Neo-Nazis because much of what they have would not make sense, any more sense than what you are saying. It would be based on perceptions of authority, society and most importantly Ideas that the world really has not need for.

      That is the game really. We need better ideas, better rational and better logic and you telling us where that is to be found is childish and unproven. I don’t believe in you. I don’t want your ‘Authority’ dressed up in the trapping of society, it is just a variation of the same of game. The doomsday clock should be a constant reminder that what has worked in the past may not work now.

      Anyway you are now saying well what is your bright idea. Your are all hot and bothered that I burned you and most likely will learn nothing and logic and rational will only break down further

      Unfortunately I don’t think Caitlin and others like will be able in the long run to hold back the tide of people who like you, who say you mean well, destroying our mos precious gifts, human thought freely ably to explore thrive upon vast horizon of human logic and rational. You bring only death and destruction, nothing new.

      Here is the only solution I see as plausible at this moment. We must address our most basic power center, human intellect and thought, and not through censorship, (how very crude)

      We must step into a world that functions fundamentally different that this one on all levels, intellectually, Societally. We much change the interpretation of “Authority” human logic and rational as a whole within us ‘Humanity’ as as whole must be held up.

      https://medium.com/@whmilk/the-value-of-anonymity-in-a-collective-intelligence-c0a003f481b6

      https://medium.com/@whmilk/here-is-a-book-i-have-placed-on-amazon-and-smashwords-e864cc0e2c60

      https://medium.com/@whmilk/what-is-a-real-solution-696608f98b78

      1. Tue Sorensen Avatar
        Tue Sorensen

        Clint, I apologize, but I find it hard to relate your rambling comments to what I wrote. I’m sorry you feel that human history is dominated by war and chaos. No, sociology certainly does not “annihilate human logic”. Your perspective seems both highly selective and very focused on the negative (jaded?). I can’t really say much more than that you and I think very differently.

        1. You really say nothing other that throw out subjective generalizations and put downs ( a fallacy).
          You just want the world to march to your ideas, ‘because’ . This is what happens when the cart is before the horse. Your ideas lead your thinking. Then after you have basically done nothing you want us all to applaud your “ideas’ and ‘opinions’ . Like going to work doing nothing and wanting to get paid.

    5. You really are the most frightening and scary thing I have seen lately. When it is all said and done the world is a ‘Power’ struggle. It is about the application of power. The is the power of ‘Authority’ there is ‘Physical’ power and there is ‘intellectual’ power which operates upon the ideas of logic and reason. You claim as your own the power of logic and reason without utilizing it. You just ‘claim’ it . Then you grab “Authority’ by subjectively appraising right from wrong, good from bad. It is only a matter of time until you indulge in ‘Physical’ power to support your other claims which you claim as your sole domain. You and your Marxist idealogical brothers will be lining the unwashed up against the wall for the greater good while at night you expound upon your ‘Humanity’

      1. Tue Sorensen Avatar
        Tue Sorensen

        Well, Clint, I can assure you that, you being an anti-Marxist, you are every bit as frightening and evil to me as I am to you. Woooo. Rambling comments on blogposts are no place to understand each other or discuss complex things in detail, esp. when we come from extremely different political backgrounds, so let’s just accept that we do not, and will not, understand each other. What are you doing being a follower of Caitlin; do you not realize that she is far, far left? Oh well, the comment section always attracts sooo many crazies. Seems to be a law of nature. We’re all crazy down here!

        1. What a wonderful life you have made for yourself. You seem to be 40% opinion backed up by nothing, 35% putdown, wooo, crazies and 25% filler that beefs up your opinions and putdowns.

        2. And you are wrong. so you retreat to, “blogposts are no place to understand each other or discuss complex things in detail, ” You have nothing to offer other than your inflated opinion with nothing to back it up. This a a great place to share ideas. Just say what you mean. Make a point and explain the reasoning. No mind games necessary.

        3. You are nothing but a rumbling, rolling thunder of intellectual dishonesty in the service of self, ego and who knows what. You want the world to bend to your , ‘marxist ideas’ just because. yep ‘just because’, oh, but they are scientific!!! Uh, no thanks

            1. That is the best you can do? You soak up other ‘humans’ thoughts, concerns and ideals like a piece of granite. But we need you Tue to show us true, morality, the good from the bad, what humanity was meant to be!

    6. “Oppression is absolutely a morally bad thing.”
      Censorship is oppression. There’s your disconnect.

      1. Tue Sorensen Avatar
        Tue Sorensen

        Sorry, but no – not in the cases I’m referring to. Those who preach hate will also spread hate and commit hateful acts and they must be opposed. If you want to protect everyone, no matter how reprehensible, from censorship, then you are also allowing oppression of a lot of people’s minds to happen by letting hate and prejudice run rampant. You cannot fight for good if you allow appalling crimes to go unpunished (and spreading fake news is an appalling crime, whether done out of spite or sheer sociopathic insanity). That is the simple truth of it. If you want to fight for greater social justice, you must have moral convictions and definitions of what is good and what is bad, and you must have the courage to act on and stand by those convictions. There can be no positive change if we do not make a very strong and progressive effort to separate good from bad and fight for the good and against the bad. It sounds banale, but I’m just putting it in the simplest terms possible. We must be like superheroes and stop the supervillains.

        If your moral attitude amounts to live and let live, giving all views equal time, then nothing will change and you will not truly be fighting to promote progressive values. Progressive politics is also about actual progress, and in that process some prejudices need to be left behind. We can’t forever debate whether Nazism, racism, sexism, etc. might be acceptable. We gotta move ahead on the absolute conviction that they are NOT acceptable, and to some extent or other that means suppressing them until people stop being dumb enough to be seduced by them (which eventually they will). I’m not necessarily talking about violent suppression, and maybe not even strong suppression, but in order to create a significantly better world we have to fervently promote our progressive agenda and be against those agendas that are incompatible with ours. We do have to insist (if we had the power to) that some extremist ideas, incl. obviously crazy science-denial, are too harmful and hateful to be allowed free reign. And we have to educate people so they don’t believe in absurdities. That is and must be part of our entire mission to improve the world. As for who decides which things are “absurdities” and which are true; it’s simple: Science decides. With sufficient scientific understanding, the human mind and morals and history also become knowable to a far more objective extent than they are now. True progressives look ahead. And educate themselves ahead of the curve.

        And to try and put it in even clearer terms: There is no real difference between censoring speech and censoring, for instance, political policies. So whenever a democratic election has been held, the policies of the loser, whose side comprises (in principle and hopefully mostly in fact) anything from 1 to 50% of the voters, is suppressed. Disallowed. Incapacitated. Prevented. Considered wrong by the winning side. All a kind of censorship and oppression, but a justified kind that society as a whole has agreed to, under the rules of established democracy. Representative democracy is always a dictatorship of the majority against the minority. Under the prevailing rules (which we can debate whether are warranted), this is justified. So when enough of us agree to not let right-wing extremists and science-deniers and fake news spreaders have free reign to fool the ignorant, then censoring them is justified.

        1. Please give examples. What are the actions or beliefs that characterize a “right wing extremist”, a “science -denier” and a “fake news spreader”. What are we talking about here? What science, what branch of science? Which news is “fake news” How to you identify these things if you do not know the characteristics of them? Not generalities. What does a “right wind extremist” think? What science is being denied? How do you know which news to trust?

        2. Barbara Mullin Avatar
          Barbara Mullin

          However one side is never completely right and the other side completely wrong. So many “progressives” today are totally fooled about the DNC and what has been going on since Ronald Reagan. No one should sit in judgment saying I make the decision and your side will no longer be able to speak. Every once in awhile even Fox News or Trump says something correct. Trump exposes the fallacies of what has preceded him.

          1. Barbara: Libel, slander, blasphemy – there are plenty of laws curtailing and censoring freedom of speech already. If you want freedom of speech to the utmost consequence, which by my definition would inevitably include a lot of “free” actions following up on that speech, you could hardly justify laws of any kind. Putting someone in jail for any reason would be oppression and censorship. In many ways it is! So people need a wider definition and understanding of what “censorship” really is. It’s not a simple thing. In our society we already have so many laws and conventions that our so-called freedom is vastly curtailed in a plethora of ways. We are already subjected to so much propaganda and ideologically biassed “news” that most people haven’t even begun to learn how to think about and judge complex matters for themselves. A little bit of censorship here and there makes almost no difference, compared to how bad things already are. We should of course be vigilant and oppose censorship as a general rule, but it’s really not worth our time to protest against the likes of Icke and Jones being deservedly booted off social media. I wish we had some alternative additional examples of who or what this censorship is being used to censor, specifically. Then we could talk about the meat of this matter.

        3. So where Jones and Icke guilty of “ Libel, slander, blasphemy” did they break some laws. No, if there was a need to censor them then there should be a debate and if necessary laws passed. This did not happen. Some ‘individual” decided what they had to say did not need to be heard. This individual or group of individuals also decided that What the WHO says is beyond repute. Do you believe that? Do you? So if they say three things and two are not true, logical or rational yet one thing they said was unique and a valuable perspective? Could this not be? Would they still not provide a service? Your fault is that you attempt to condense everything down to a black and white , superheroes , villains mentality.. You want to stereotype and demonize those who do not think or fall in line with you. You also try to equate thought crimes with physical crimes. To justify what you say and what you do. Censoring speech is Censoring thought it is as simple as that. You say free speech may result in free actions thought I believe there are laws for intimidation and threat. So again tell me the thoughts and characteristics of a ‘right wing extremist”, just so I know what to watch out for. Am I a right wing extremist? Why? It is just a label to justify your hate and your seizure of power over society.
          What is the fundamental lesson everyone should learn in Elementary school but for some reason they don’t, That stereotyping and demonizing people is an fallacy and error, a shortcut to win argument by cheating. It is what they did when they sold the slaves. It is what they did when they launched the wars and still do. ( The Russians), It should be so simple, yet here you are on your moral high ground attempting to defend it and finding any sneaky way you can to disqualify the other person. If you really cared about people then you would want them to be able to say what they think without fear of retribution. It is called communication.

        4. you still spouting that pish. You must do a lot of dictionary reading you. Still talk shite!

    7. It doesn’t look like this got up here the first time I tried it. Ah, well. Better late than never. I probably forgot some step.

      Duh, yah! What he sez…

      Well, maybe not exactly. Oh, dear. Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the internet, I get drawn into another one of these blog-tail discussions.

      So, Caitlin has run on us another version of the “I disagree with what you say, but I fight the death for your right to say it” trope. We have to let the icky people do their thing in public or somebody might stop us from doing our thing, too.

      Then along comes Sorenson and points to exactly what is wrong wth that trope; it ignores that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and true and false. An adult is supposed to have learned to tell these apart. If they have not, they should not be in any responsible position.

      The big problem I notice in Liberalism is precisely the lack of capacity to distinguish right and wrong. More exactly, an inability to decide anything. So ultimately everything has to be tolerated, so there is no way to control antisocial behaviour, so antisocial behaviour gradually comes to dominate society and you have social breakdown. Liberalism is a great deal for sociopaths.

      So Sorensen is right and Cait is wrong. But oops! Wait here…He is also saying that David Icke and Alex Jones are bad guys who should be censored. I have only heard a little from these two. They really aren’t to my taste. But I have no major problems with them. I have never seen any just reason to censor and deplatform them.

      Alex Jones was a lot less obnoxious than a lot of more extreme paranoid libertarians. I never heard anything racist or antisemitic from him. He has been subject to such a smear campaign that it is hard to separate fact and fiction about him.

      I have heard even less from David Icke. I don’t know about this ‘new age’ stuff attributed to him. He had some good stuff about the way the forces of evil use pedophiles to do their dirty work.

      They do not let anyone get into a position of power unless they have something like that on them. So pedophile rings are an important part of their system for qualifying and preparing our future ‘leaders’. I have had this same information corroborated by other, more credible sources.

      So the question is not, should we censor, or who should be censored. It is, who is most fit to do the censoring? Which is really saying, who is most fit to govern? That is where the real discussion starts.

      That is a big enough topic for about twenty blog posts. I am not going to get started on it here. I can conclude with one comment on the idea of freedom of speech. I say the worst form of oppression is not censorship. It is uncontrolled free speech which corrodes people’s critical thinking faculties.

      For discussion to be any use, grownups have to be in charge of it. Adults have to be in charge.

      1. Tue Sorensen Avatar
        Tue Sorensen

        Thank you! Yeah, educated people need to be in charge. People who understand things. Otherwise this a world of morons who vote aggressively against their own interests.

        I really wouldn’t put stock in that pedophile thing, though – that’s an insane conspiracy theory just like Icke’s other looney-bin idea that most of our leaders are lizard people! LOL! It’s very possible that SOME of the rich and powerful have dirt on each other (some of them must have quite some skeletons in the closet, no doubt), but I really don’t think it involves a “pedophile ring”. That’s too far out.

  21. Guy Baribeau Avatar
    Guy Baribeau

    The telephone companies never had the right to censor conversations between their customers. Why should
    we tolerate such claims by You Tube or Facebook or anyone else on the ground that they are private companies. The internet is a public pathway. All censorship is dictatorship.

  22. Great article, Caitlin. Another commenter has mentioned that Southfront got kicked off of Facebook and Youtube, presumably due to presenting content in opposition to US warfare in the Middle East. Unz.com, a broad spectrum dissident site, got kicked off of Facebook due to Ron Unz dissenting from the rulers’ narrative as to the origins of the corona virus. There have been many more dissenting articles on the site over the years including ones by Ron Unz himself. Many of these seem superficially to be much more controversial than what he has written or published about the virus. The very fact that dissent from the establishment virus narrative seems to be the trigger for instant de-platforming is reason enough to completely distrust that narrative.

  23. Caitlin, I’ve known David Icke and his work for over 20 years, including having several personal conversations with him. I find it disturbing that you would invoke his situation without having studied at least one of his books or viewed one of his videos.

    He is far from a ‘raving lunatic’! He was given a gift many years ago which he has used to unlock many secrets from the history we have had withheld from us. And this is a history I familiarized myself with back in my university days as a history major focusing on the Middle East.

    He recently published an epic tome which encapsulates in one volume his research. It’s title is ‘Trigger: The Lie That Changed The World – Who Really Did It And Why’.

    Get my drift?

    1. “This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke…. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.” Get the drift?

  24. For other reasons, my husband and I got into a discussion about independent thinkers and he made the point, which I agreed with, that independent thinkers are always called ‘nut jobs.’ Because the ‘establishment’ (whoever they are) always want to discredit a message they can’t control. And, while there is certainly a sense of ‘the establishment’ as some control behemoth, the fact there are more ‘nut jobs’ around means they don’t quite have the control advertised. Mao never got the Chinese off smoking despite ‘Orwellian’ control; a bunch of Chinese kids were able to thwart a teacher’s homework Apple app. It’s our media not telling us about Chinese exceptions. The fact ‘I’ question the narrative means ‘I’ am one of the ‘nut jobs’ the ‘establishment’ doesn’t control. So, by no means is it in control when ‘I’ refuse to let them control me. Of course, I could be deluded, but then ‘I’m’ a ‘nut job’ already. Weird thinking?

    1. Here’s one of my favorite “nut jobs” in the sense you describe, the son of a man who was murdered, like his brother before him, to facilitate the deep state coup that took over the U.S. government, at first a covert operation, now overt in all its arrogant and violent “glory.” By the way, Robert Kennedy Jr. suffers from a rare disease that affects his speech, but he still comes across loud and clear on this video, too clear to be comfortable to anyone but another of us “nut jobs.”

      http://edwardcurtin.com/this-rfk-jr-interview-is-very-significant/

  25. Barbara Mullin Avatar
    Barbara Mullin

    I have some relatives and friends who reject what I send them with a big “SPAM” notice coming back to me. Not sure if the recipient really gets the message or the computer somehow makes that decision. In Delaware
    Lifelong Learning program, we have an instructor formally with CNN and Great Decisions who warns the class about the internet. He frequently has guests from the CIA in his classroom. Students become very wary of anything that is not WaPo, NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, MSNBC and of course never the FOX news.

  26. M R Harrison Avatar
    M R Harrison

    I think a case can be made that the world crisis due to Sars-Cov2 will, in all probability, be less well understood in total and in the long run due to the takedown of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. What are the odds that, were WikiLeaks fully functioning and ardently defended today, some conscientious whistleblower(s) might avail themselves to disclose important inside information?

  27. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
    R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

    Caliban is sensitive, (especially when he is in someone else’s house), about not wanting to “dominate the rap jack”, but I do have, (or think I have), “something new to say”. (From ‘New Speedway Boogie’ for those not familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nOpJMQ3-VE ).

    But this is such a centrally crucial subject, (crucial o the Left’s objectives), that a dumb ole ape like Caliban just can’t hardly help himself.

    This essay from Ms. Johnstone clearly shines with her typical brilliance, but I’m not sure it actually demonstrates a full consciousness of the actual full scope of ‘the problem’. (It may … I’m just not sure).

    There is nothing more typical of the Left than ‘cry-baby’-type complaints about the behavior of what many call the “main-stream media’, (MSM), as if our complaints have any power to bring about any change in Mass Media behavior. Note that one commenter above calls the MSM “ass-kissers’, as if they are merely serving the wrong master. This is a very serious flaw in people’s consciousness.

    The Mass Media don’t merely serve a ‘master’. They ARE The Master. Sure … sure … We have a ‘free press’ in the US. Our ‘press’ is ‘free’ from direct government control. Our press is merely under the TOTAL (as in totalitarian) control of the same people who control the government.

    The Mass Media Barons are more powerful than government. Government has been reduced to their servile handmaid. In the US, the Mass Media Barons have even reduced our electoral process itself to a clown-circus reality TV show.

    This has been going on for some time. It’s already been over three years since ‘do no evil’ Google, among THE most evil forces in the US, actually began changing its infamous ‘algorithms’ to keep search traffic from being directed to alt-media sites.

    One primary method this evil Google-Devil uses is to list every source for a single propaganda ‘story’ individually. Since thousands of Mass Media outlets are quite literally reading, word for word, from the same centrally produced script, a search for a given term will return those thousands of ‘hits’ individually, before a single alt-media hit appears, (maybe on page 25 of the search results, and how many will scroll through that many pages of a search?).

    Just yesterday I listened to an interview with Chris Hedges, who reported that his own site averaged 700k visits per day in 2017, but now gets less than 200k. That’s over 70% reduction, which Google (and other primary search engines) achieved simply by altering their algorithms.

    Censorship is becoming more overt, and it will only continue to become ever MORE overt. But the most insidious ‘censorship’ are the tools used to restrict, rather than overtly censor, communications among citizens. I noticed several weeks ago, for example, that Google is restricting the number of recipient addressees allowed on an email, for example. I still don’t know if this represents a change in general policy, or was specifically targeting me as an individual, but emails that I have been sending to various ‘lists’ I have compiled over the years, (not ‘mass-mailings”, but rather small lists of 25-100 recipients), began bouncing back as “undelivered”, with no explanation whatsoever, forcing me to split the lists down and laboriously send a single email as multiple emails. (I don’t have a ‘mass mail’ application, and for years had just been using a free Google email account, which used to allow something like 2000 emails per day, (not sure the exact number), and several hundred recipients on each email).

    The means of communication are the means of power, folks, and our Enemy did not become perhaps the most powerful enemy that has ever existed in all Human History by being stupid. Our Enemy keenly recognized the immense power of modern communications media from the time that the first ‘commercial’ appeared on a radio program in 1927.

    People were much different then, because they had not yet been brought under the dominion of Mass Media. They had not yet been molded into compliance. People of that day were OUTRAGED that commercial interests would DARE to impose their crass commercial messages into people’s own homes. It was a VERY controversial social and political issue at that time, because people yet had a sense of their own basic dignity as citizens.

    By 1948, when TV barely yet even existed, the terrible implications following from the power of mass media were already obvious to visionaries, like Orwell. ‘1984’ , which was published in ’48, foretold what we are now discussing this very morning, at Ms. Johnstone’s wise behest.

    Power does NOT restrain itself. This was the essence of Orwell’s ‘vision’. Power will use any means it can find, and will invent means if they can’t be found, to entrench itself, and grow.

    It has ALWAYS been inevitable that power would recognize and bring under its control the power of mass communications media.

    The point I’m trying to make here is that these conditions are a ‘given’ in the environment we must operate in, as we struggle to build a more just and peaceful world.

    All our cry-baby complaints about the “main-stream media” are NOT going to change Mass Media behavior, and our complaints themselves, unless ‘framed’ as merely ‘instructional/educational’, (rather than being ‘framed’ as expectations that if we just complain enough MSM behavior will change), are counter-productive because they foment expectations that enough cry-baby complaints WILL bring change.

    The MSM do NOT merely ‘serve’ our Enemy. The Mass Media Barons ARE our Enemy.

    Apologies to Ms. Johnstone for any offense taken from Caliban “dominating the rap”. But I just don’t hear anyone else saying what crucially needs to be said. Censorship is just going to INEVITABLY get worse, because we have NO power to prevent it getting worse. The Mass Media Barons are WAY too cunning to allow us to use THEIR tools against them, to gain power for ourselves

    These conditions are a ‘given’. If we are going to succeed, (as Caliban fully intends to), we MUST figure out a way to operate UNDER these ‘given’ conditions and yet prevail.

    1. Bingo. Far better than the recent Tabbai essay linked in Caitlin’s article is his book entitled “Hate, Inc.” There, he exhaustively and incisively exposes how the MSM is not merely a part of the problem but, in large degree, has itself become the problem, succeeding beyond all bounds in selling hate, fear, and resentment to the public (right toward left and left toward right) and thereby locking us into our respective silos of simmering loathing and instinctive lash-back. Usually, Caitlin pushes the envelope in her commentary, in which tendency lies her greatness as a blogger. Here, for whatever reason, she fails to do so, but can anyone be expected to be perfect?

  28. The spigot of free speech was turning too slow. This fear pandemic was an excellent opportunity to speed up the clising. I am just astounded and shocked by the majority of people that seem to support this type censorship. People are simply stupid and easily controlled. Revolution usually does not take place until conditions become unbearable. We are evidently not there yet.

  29. The real problem is that we’re not allowed to talk about the problem because almost all of the flesh and blood agents running this dystopian shit show come from a protected group with entrenched tribal loyalites that no one is ever allowed to criticize. https://archive.org/details/johnnygatnamesthejew.

    From the billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants using their extensive ties to the warmongering Zionists and neo-con sociopaths in the US government to control human communication, while the narrow predatory interests of the central bankers work in lockstep with the propaganda machine of a tightly controlled mainstream media to keep the public ignorant of the daylight robbery that’s hidden in plain sight, as multinational corporate oligarchs make obscene profits from human misery under the cover of intelligence agencies that fuction as Wall Streets private military, while their rogue CIA/Mossad spooks run global child sex slave rings to blackmail pedo elites and then elevated these degenerate cowards into positions of power (both Trump and Biden), and so on…

    When you identify the flesh and blood human agents behind all this depravity its simply impossible to avoid the truth: the most radical forms of evil on the planet today are being committed by racist, supremacist Zionist Jews. Every single time. And no one is allowed to talk about it because we’ve all been psychologically conditoned from birth and for multiple generations to believe only the most evil Satanic monster would ever say such a thing out loud. What an amazing coincidence!!

    Do you see now how deep this problem of confronting radical evil really goes? I can accept that its stragegically foolish and tactically suicidal to even go there, but how then are we to confront evil without avoiding the truth in cowardly compromise? Its simply impossible to meditate on ones own personal complicity with such evil and still remain silent.

    1. Amen Freeman! Thank you for that outspoken comment.

    2. By cliking on the link, we have this message

      “The item you have requested had an error:
      Item cannot be found.
      which prevents us from displaying this page.

      Items may be taken down for various reasons, including by decision of the uploader or due to a violation of our Terms of Use.”

      Is there censorship ?

      1. Here you go Faouzi, Bitchute has a copy too. Thanx for letting me know https://www.bitchute.com/video/pcVByXR4hqwl/

  30. Such censorship does serve a purpose. Truth can bear any criticism, examination, or argument. It does not need censorship to protect it. What does need censorship to protect it is a lie. And so the vast majority of what we are expected to believe is a lie. In fact, there is very little truth available from any popular source. It must be looked for among the censored and the less popular. Like here.

    1. Although there are many great websites on the internet; Ms Johnstones site and these two are the first I look at every day.
      https://www.strategic-culture.org/
      http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

      1. Thinking outside the proverbial box has its problems ,i.e. finding others that have freed their minds.But once there ,one can never go back .
        Good article Caitlin and good comments all around also.
        A few other sites to add to the list:
        https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/03/review-planet-of-the-humans/
        https://www.fort-russ.com/
        https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/28/opcw-insiders-ltamenah-chemical-weapons-report/#more-23745

  31. David Icke has been proved right more times than wrong over the last 20 years. I don’t agree with everything he says but as a free-thinking human I have the ability to watch his material and make up my own mind.

    I disagree with nearly everything in the mainstream media but I wouldn’t argue for any publication to be shut down. The west is getting more and more like China while still proclaiming how free we are.

    Bitchute / LBRY seem to be the way forward but it will take time to build up the traffic.

  32. ROSE – ICKE III MAY 3RD 5 PM LONDON TIME

    Push back against media censorship. Join the #LondonRealArmy and support the Digital Freedom Platform. Watch Brian Rose interview David Icke 3 Sunday May 3rd 5 pm UK time. As Caitlin says, this is not about Icke, it’s about freedom of speech. LondonReal expect 1000 000 + viewers for this livestream.

    https://londonreal.tv/1000000-fighting-for-freedom/

    1. Yes I will be tuning in later today this will be a must. You have to keep an open mind, even if the virus exists it is no more deadly than seasonal flu which we never even talk about never mind lock the world down.

  33. History is proof that “authority” narrative is always wrong , so censorship IS wrong.

  34. “This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.”

    Simple, really: Don’t use the stuff. And if you can convince everyone you know to do the same, the fortunes of a certain “Sugar Mountain” will gradually dissipate.

    1. Sadly, if one looks at what is “trending” and/or “popular”, it becomes abundantly clear that the vast majority of Youtube viewers are not looking for any education or enlightenment. Indeed, it appears they aren’t even looking for entertainment with any quality or substance. They are in the matrix, and are perfectly content to stay there. While I do encourage going to Bitchute etc., I doubt it will have any significant effect on Youtube, and just the same with its owner Google.

  35. whatevernevermind Avatar
    whatevernevermind

    Re: “The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who “tells people to inject disinfectant.” https://t.co/KFA8jC6XiY

    Why are you repeating this bullshit – he never said those words

    Watch the press conference again – I thought this article was about censorship

    1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
      R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

      This commenter is essentially correct, although she or he is talking about propaganda, rather than censorship. The ‘antidote’ to propaganda is not better propaganda, the antidote to propaganda is the truth.

      The comment Trump made was stupid, and revealed his ignorance, but he did NOT say that anyone should ‘inject disinfectant’. Nor, for example, did he call Mexican’s rapists. He said (paraphrasing) that “Mexico is not sending us its good people as immigrants. Mexico is sending us its criminals, its rapists”.

      Truth is our most powerful potential ally. But the truth will only serve us if we will faithfully serve it. The truth knows no command. The truth only serves itself. The only way to have the truth ‘in our camp’ is to seek it out with all the diligence we can muster, and pitch our own tents close by.

      Left propaganda is actually much more damaging to the Left itself, than Right propaganda is to the Right, due to the Right’s exponential advantage in access to the means of communication. But even if our access to communications media were more equal to the Right’s, we still damage our own cause more when we abandon truth in favor of propaganda, because the Left’s cause, the Left’s ethos, the Left’s very credibility, as the ‘party’ out of power, is inherently more dependent on truth for success. If people must choose between two ‘parties’ whose credibility is suspect, they will tend to choose the status quo, because their lives are rooted in it, and “the devil you know is a safer bet than the devil you don’t know”.

      The American Left’s credibility among non-Leftists is VERY low, precisely because the Left has indulged itself so freely in howling, often even hysterical, propaganda, which has come to be known, in its current iteration, as TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome.

      This is one of the primary reasons that some 70% of Americans support the Left’s major policy agenda, (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Tax the Rich, etc), but 77% of Americans cannot stand the actual American Left itself, at ALL, and between 40% and 50% hate the Left’s fracking guts with intense passion.

      1. Astute observations well worth pondering.

    2. Thank you, Whatevernevermind, and R Zwarich. Too many people buy the propaganda of the MSM, even those who acknowledge that the MSM lies. It was very clear that Trump was never advocating for people to inject household cleaning products into their bodies. He was just musing about how well sunlight and certain disinfectants work on killing this virus and how it would be nice to have somethign that worked equally well that could be used as a treatment for the virus. Even Dr. Birx (and others) have backed him up on this.
      …………………..

      Likewise, he never said that all Mexicans were rapists, as RZ points out. He was saying that Mexico was sending all of their “bad guys” over here instead of the good guys. They were sending *their* rapists (not they’re rapists).
      ……………..

      I’m not a Trump voter, but we should all agree that honesty and accuracy should matter. If anything, the media will be to blame for his re-election, as they have made him a martyr of him.

  36. Graham Butcher Avatar
    Graham Butcher

    I listened to a couple of David Ike’s talks on the Corona virus and he definitely made more sense than anything I have heard from the BBC or other MSM. I have been aware of Ike for many years but not followed him closely. From what I gather he has a theory that our rulers are not of the same species as us which explains why they treat us the way they do. The more conventional explanation is that tyrants are human but psychopaths and thus lacking human empathy. Okay it is insane to believe that our rulers are not really human but is it more reassuring to accept that we let ourselves be ruled by psychopaths? At least Ike is a genuine free thinker and he is right about a lot more than the BBC ever is.
    As for censorship, I really don’t know why they are bothering to even make the effort. All the intelligent, educated, and supposedly informed people I know are happy to accept the official propaganda and swallow what the msm tells them hook, line, and sinker. The biggest complaint that they have about our government is that they didn’t clamp down sooner and are not taking the advice from Imperial college seriously enough.
    I guess there will never be a vaccine for stupid and until there is why bother with censorship?

    1. Mark McEntee Avatar
      Mark McEntee

      Could not agree with you more. Like you I have only listened to him more recently and he makes total sense on this fake pandemic. I cannot believe virtually all media even the independent media seem to be not seeing the woods from the trees. Even the normally sceptical platforms are missing the massive story staring them in the face. There are many experts speaking out too check out Dr Erickson although YouTube is removing them as quick as they arrive. Some have many millions of views. I think more of the general public are seeing through this than the media are it is very frustrating.

      1. whatevernevermind Avatar
        whatevernevermind

        no, they are not missing it – they are IGNORING IT and censoring real information. Google up “who owns the media” and connect the dots.

        1. I am talking about the normally decent Independent media like this site and numerous others who are missing it which is a shame. Yes MSM and its masters are ignoring it and censoring the truth I agree.

      2. Why are you calling Covid-19, a fake pandemic? I’m just curious. We are finding out more and more interesting things about this virus each day. It attacks our endothelial linings of our blood vessels- that is why so many people are dying of sudden clots, occurring all over the body. These linings are rich in ACE2 receptors, like our lungs are where the virus gains its entry into our airways. Try a few episodes of Med-Cram lectures on Covid- try episode #63 and #65 to help you understand the ways this virus kills. Hint, It ain’t “fake” news.

        1. Yes, the truth is that we don’t yet know enough about Covid-19 to accurately assess its lethality, propensity to spread, likelihood of return or mutation, etc. Sadly, scientific humility seems lacking, and people (both professionals and laity) are instead jumping to conclusions. For a balanced view from a world-class expert on interpreting medical data, one can listen, sequentially, to two YouTube interviews of Standford’s Dr. Ioannidis, which I believe have not yet been erased. In the first interview, Ioannidis is extremely tentative but tries his best to caution us against panic. In the second interview, when a lot more data have come in, he suggests, without casting blame on our prior decisions, that we might want to consider a gradual lifting of certain social restrictions while keeping a close eye on how that plays out. Yet even HE has been personally and promiscuously attacked for daring to offer such eminently reasonable opinions.

  37. Mark McEntee Avatar
    Mark McEntee

    Caitlin you would be surprised at how much you and David Icke have in common he is smeared by the same narrative managers you point out. He called out Syria chemical weapons, how corporations run media and many many other of the same issues you do give him a go. He is one of many calling out the fake pandemic literally hundreds of senior experts are too. YouTube have removed them. Many Independent journalists are too. The biggest obvious one is just look at the numbers deaths are smaller than seasonal flu despite the numbers being inflated to include people dieing with but not of covid 19. Best website on this is swisspropagandaresearch and offguardian.
    This is the biggest story of the century most of the media are just missing

    1. Your a liar. The numbers aren’t ‘less than the seasonal flu’ and it’s not a ‘fake pandemic’.

      1. Seasonal flu 290 to 650 thousand worldwide deaths every year just Google it. Should we call that a pandemic every year? Plus the coronavirus virus numbers are being inflated as anyone who dies with it and not necessarily of it. Many experts are speaking out please be sceptical at least and look it up. We dont even talk about flu and yet close the world down for this. The lockdown and subsequent consequences will kill far more people than the so called virus ever will

        1. What part of “novel virus” do you not understand. Please be evidence-based in your assertions. Willful ignorance is not a good human trait.

      1. Crawl back under your bed and leave sane people alone.

  38. The ” owners and the masters ” will never be satisfied with ” any peon ” having any freedom whatsoever. You think what they want you to think; you do what they want you to do; you live they way they want you to live; you die they way they want you to die; absolutely nothing else is acceptable! Being ” different ” can be very hazardous to your health.

  39. Thank you Caitlin. A huge censorship target involves vaccines. The Lockdowners obeying Fauci’s Fatwa demand enforced vaccinations as a solution because there are billions to be made. A natural herd immunity approach that has served humanity for millennia is prohibited because there are few profits to be made. Any demand for safe vaccines, let alone no vaccines, is erased from the media. No wonder YouTube bans criticism of vaccines — its owner Google is partners with one of the big five vaccine manufacturers as this link shows. https://endpts.com/googles-verily-teams-with-glaxosmithkline-on-a-713m-bioelectronic-startup/

    1. whatevernevermind Avatar
      whatevernevermind

      #firefauci

  40. Vermessenheit Avatar
    Vermessenheit

    Bet you have to pinch yourself that you have wound up publicly defending David Icke. Yes he may be a wack job, but i give him credit for being one of the first people to correctly call out elite pedophilia in the UK before it became an established fact. For he and others like him, Sometimes the evil space lizard thing is just a cover to ensure they are not embraced too widely while still ensuring their message gets out, although it can be hard to guess when they are bullsh…ing and when they are serious. Definitely a speaker whose freedom is worth defending.
    At least he didn’t try to Knight Prince Phillip !

    https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ellen-grace-jones/david-icke-what-went-righ_b_2038784.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS5hdS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAD76njTS48T_2I2GtnhqDRgS1hcTBykHib_WG4So9c-dZoZ9IVfePlY40QGT5nIY4KkU7-BJ0hJ5BeO4SUmbth8m0hkoR-TkERxy34dlLw3RYUF5auihWF7s4YW5Yv3PMp82Q3_pe79-L3D-nvjbyLnRXlMuC-DdmX4oJnNM-6IJ

  41. Even with your large following you are probably talking to a bubble in the sea, from what I see of the humans in this all American small town outside of Chicago, absolutely nothing wrong with mass murder and rape, is it any wonder then that people like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy are running the country here?

  42. Janet Zampieri Avatar
    Janet Zampieri

    I follow David Icke, and one of the things he often says is that the establishment wants to use the model of China for the rest of the world. So, you and Icke have something in common!

    1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
      R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

      Yes. Orwell said this too, in 1948, (when ‘1984’ was published). This is nothing new. Censorship is inevitable in undemocratic authoritarian nations, like the US.

  43. Michael Goldenberg Avatar
    Michael Goldenberg

    I do not have much doubt that Icke is out of his mind, and that’s strictly based on my take on what he says, not anyone else’s view of him. But it’s ridiculous to censor him for his flights of paranoia, just as it was pointless to censor Alex Jones.

    Except that there’s always a point (or two) and they’re always the same things: 1) a message to anyone who doubts that these monolithic media platforms and outlets are more powerful than anyone else (they’re not, but they sure know how to play hardball) so they can get rid of anyone for just about any reason; it’s THEIR jacks and ball and if they don’t want you playing with them, they have the money and bribes in place to pretty much ensure that they get away with it; 2) they’ve learned that in this age of fauxgressives, pseudoliberals, neoliberals, and centrists, the correct play is to smash either someone on the far right or someone perceived by liberals and centrists as insane, preferable a crazy-sounding huckster like Jones or an actual basket-case like Icke.

    But the actual target isn’t the far right or the dangerously crazy: it’s the left. While Sanders supporters, Clintonites, and loads of other allegedly liberal and progressive people cheered the removal of Jones, people paying attention (and there were some) kept pointing out that this was going to be a VERY quick case of “for whom the bell tolls,” namely most of them. I argued it. Jimmy Dore argued it. Many people did and others smelled the coffee as soon as the first attacks for being Russian assets started being hurled at Bernie and Tulsi, and others.

    But what is scary and depressing is how many people couldn’t see it even then, can’t see it even now, and truly won’t see it until they’re about to be hanged in the public square. Not that I will be crying, if I’m not already gone, but if we can’t wake them up before it’s too late (and I am skeptical that we can), we’re in deep, deep trouble.

    1. It might be worthwhile for someone with a few idle millions hanging around to start free versions of such as Youtube (Freetube?) and see what one could get away with. There are already more or less free versions of Facebook, like Diaspora. Fire the boss and the Ruling Class! Migrate!

      1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
        R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

        This wouldn’t necessarily really help too much, (it probably could in some ways, depending on how and what it was built into being), because what you could then have is dissidents voluntarily removing themselves from Mass Media access, to create a ‘safe space’ where people can take turns “preaching to the choir”.

        This is a very large discussion in itself. (I’ll try to be brief here, although that is always difficult for blabbery idiots like ‘Caliban’).

        Politics is a numbers game. The object of the game is to get the most people on our side. To get more people on our side we need to communicate with the people who are NOT on our side, so we can win them to our side.

        A ‘safe space’, (as this Caitlyn Johnstone forum is), has its own value, for various reasons, and in many ways, but communicating in ‘safe spaces’ does not help us all that much politically, because it does not help win more people to our side.

    2. Its neither “Left” nor “Right”. Its all about money. Any corporation exists to make money. If they don’t concentrate on that, the shareholders sue the executives, claiming they aren’t doing their job. Every corporation exists to make money. Period.
      These corporations feel that their best way to make money is to be close to powerful people. They are locked into making money, and they don’t want that to change. Nope, they want that to grow.
      We’ve seen the dances of government forces threatening to tax or regulate the corporations. The corporations decided that being in bed with those powerful people is the best place for them to be to make more money.
      These corporations are not against either the Left or the Right. Those arguments are all Red Herrings. These corporations are allied with the government to make money. So, they don’t like anyone who challenges or threatens that.

      1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
        R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

        Bingo! Give this person a prize!

        “Left” and “Right” have been cunningly fashioned into artificial constructs that have been divorced from class consciousness.

        As long as Human ‘civilization’ has existed, (once tribal groups banded with other tribal groups into ‘nations’), there have been two ‘natural parties’ in ALL civilized societies. A dominating ‘party’ of Elites always evolves. And the are always the Common People.

        In the US, both political parties have come under the complete controls of the Elites. The Common People have no representation at all in our government. (“No taxation without representation” was, of course, the major ‘battle cry’ of the first American Revolution).

        But our entire discussion, our entire consciousness, has been fragmented and distracted away from basic class consciousness, by execrable race and gender-based Identity Politics.

        People have been duped in to being divided into tribal Identity Groups that obscure, and then ignore, class consciousness. It’s the same old (same old) basic “divide and rule” strategy for social control that Elites (The Few) have used to rule over the Common People (The Many), for 10,000 years.

        The Left’s own willing abandonment of class consciousness in favor of Identity Politics is the most damaging, (from a ‘left’ perspective), because Identity Politics serves the ‘natural’ Right’s (the Elites’) objectives, and damages the ‘natural’ Left’s objectives.

        It is ‘class’ that defines Left and Right. The Right is The Elites. The Left is The Common People.

        But our own Marionette Left has allowed itself to be cunningly duped into supporting its own Enemy’s agenda, its own Enemy’s most basic “divide and rule” strategy, by adopting Identity Politics.

        On a macro scale, Identity Politics is central to the Elites neoliberal agenda of world domination. The US pretends to want to advance ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, as it tells any nation that defies our highly centralized (anti-democratic) authority, “obey us, or else we will start killing your citizens by putting your nation under economic siege, (which we euphemistically call “sanctions”).

        Indeed, as Sheppard says, “it’s all about the money”. It’s class, not race, or gender, or any other “identity” that matters.

    3. Mark McEntee Avatar
      Mark McEntee

      David Icke has been calling out narrative managers for decades in the same way Caitlin does now. He is not a nut job at all you need to give him time to listen to. He was spot on with chemical weapons false flag in Syria, who owns and controls media where real power sits and many other issues etc. Narrative managers call him a nut job to smear him but he is one of the few calling out this obvious fake pandemic, sadly not too many in the media are

      1. whatevernevermind Avatar
        whatevernevermind

        msm= lyingasskissers

        1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
          R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

          No … No … No … You got it WAY wrong, good citizen. This is a CRUCIAL point to understand.

          MSM= the Mass Media Barons that rule over us.

          The MSM do NOT ‘kiss anyone’s ass’. The Mass Media Barons own ALL our Mass Media. The MSM are their primary means of social control. (The means of communication are the means of power).

          The increasing censorship we are seeing in MSM has always been inevitable. Our Enemy was never going to allow us to use its wholly owned tool against it.

          Remember when Gerble, (who we found out at the end was the Devil in disguise), said, (in ‘The Usual Suspects’), “the Devil’s greatest power lies in convincing people he doesn’t exist”?

          It was the Scum Viper Democrats, under Slick Willie Clinton, the moist empowered our Enemy, with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed for the centralization of Mass Media into our Enemy’s total control.

          The MSM, a term we should abandon, does not kiss our Enemy’s ass, the Mass Media Barons ARE our Enemy.

      2. Thank you for talking complete sense.

  44. ” America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.

    Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”
    from the movie, “American President”

    1. R Zwarich ('Caliban') Avatar
      R Zwarich (‘Caliban’)

      This was a really good movie, (I enjoyed it), but like ‘Cinderella’, it was a complete fantasy. And it was VERY cunning ‘propaganda’.

      People should try to understand the full implications of the fact that “90% of all our mass media are owned by a small handful of corporations”. (It was “six corporations” when people first started saying this. It’s fewer now, due to ongoing mergers).

      First of all, we should realize that the other 10% are owned by individual Billionaire Oligarchs. 100% of our Mass Media are ENTIRELY controlled by a small handful of Billionaire Oligarchs who either own media outlets outright, or else own the controlling blocks of stock in media corporations.

      These people, advised by the nations’ most brilliant minds in mass psychology, (somewhere there IS a ‘Goebbels Committee’), now control ‘reality’ itself.

      These few people control not just information (news) media, but ALL mass media. This relatively small handful of people control which programs are on TV, which movies get made, which songs people hear, etc. etc. This immense power amounts to control of not merely what people think and know, but also, (and perhaps even more crucially), what people WANT. (When you control human Desire, control of human Reason is relatively easy).

      ‘The American President’, as well as programs like ‘The West Wing’, were VERY sophisticated propaganda. Both ran in the 1990s. Both supported the idea that a ‘liberal’ American government is benign, because it supports ‘human rights’. This is the CENTRAL neoliberal ruse, that the people who want to rule the world are actually the ‘good guys’ who want human freedom.

      And the most devastating FACT that we must try to understand is that even the Left, (the Marionette Left), is dancing on the ends of this powerful Enemy’s strings.

      When this movie was being produced, (it was released in 1995), our ‘liberal’ president, Slick Willie, was already helping to forge the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which paved the way for the centralization of ALL Mass Media under the control of a small handful of Billionaire Oligarchs.

      “The Devil’s most cunning ruse was to convince people he does not even exist”. (Gerble, who we later learned was actually the Devil in disguise, in ‘The Usual Suspects’).

      Show ‘the rubes’ the Devil’s naked (orange) face, and people will pine for the Devil wearing a mask. Obama, with his soaring “hope and change” oratory, was the Devil himself in his most devastatingly cunning disguise.
      (I am using figurative language here. I don’t actually believe in a red man-like figure with horns holding a fork).

  45. Any form of censorship, no matter how minor or trivial the issue might be, is very dangerous indeed. The only possible exceptions are obvious hate speech, racism, direct & obvious discrimination, and incitement to cause harm – but even then care must be taken not to allow censorship ‘creep’ to occur. Censorship of anything else directly limits basic freedom of speech and other rights.

    1. Remember, shouting “FIRE!” in a crowded theater can be an act of heroism that saves lives. Its all just a question of timing.

    2. The problem with making exceptions to free speech is that these terms and definitions (like those regarding “hate speech”) are vague and subjective, and we can easily slide into dangerous censorship when the arbiter of what is acceptable or unacceptable is someone who does not have benevolent motives.

      The only excpetion to free speech should be speech that poses a direct imminent harm to a specific person or group of people (children should always be protected, so anything targeting children, including when it comes to sexual matters, should be illegal, IMO).

      Political speech, expecially speech that challenges the establishment’s orthodoxy, should ALWAYS be protected. It is precisely dissident speech that is meant to be protected by the First Amendment.

      It’s interesting that many of the self-annointed “intellectual elites” think that the best way to become better educated and more knowledgeable is to reduce the number of resources used to gain knowledge. Having access to the greatest possible number of opinions and sources, and evaluating them based on their track records (non-mainstream sources have tended to be ahead of the curve and more correct than the MSM), comparing narrative to observable trends, data, and facts, etc., is the best way to learn about the world around us.

      1. I make lots of typos and errors, but couldn’t let this one pass: especially, not expecially. 😉

    3. Hate speech, racism, discriminatory, incitement, etc. “obvious” to you is not so obvious to others. So who defines it? That is why any censorship of any speech is an evil to be avoided.

  46. Southfront (not to be confused with the Neo-Nazi Stormfront) have also just been banned from Faecesbook and YouTube.

    Maybe it’s time the collective alternative media finally ditched their opportunism and proactively voted with their feet in protest. There are alternative platforms out there and, at the end of the day, users will always go where the good content is. We shouldn’t be dependent on YouTube any more than we depended on MySpace 15 years ago.

    1. Get you and your friends to go together. Just agree that when you are passing daily messages between yourselves, you log in to a different platform. It doesn’t matter if the whole world is there. For you and your friends to keep in touch, you only need to be there yourselves. So, get everyone to go together.
      And then hey, maybe you use both for awhile. You still use Facebook some, but you and your friends are on another platform. But then you get some of your family to contact you on the other system. Then more move. Then more move … Then more move ……..
      Then one day you see the story where the repo guys are seizing Zuckenberg’s mansion.

    2. I did chuckle when SouthFront says that it happened without warning. Ha, they’ve had years of warning. After all, this has been going on for years. It just got to Southfront, but surely they saw it coming.
      By the way, Southfront has new videos up on their website after the Youtube banning. They appear to be embedded directly into the website instead of using the lazy method of linking to Utub. And yes, putting your own video plugin on your own website is always an alternative. This appears to be Southfront’s solution, at least in the short term.
      Southfront.org.
      Go there, bookmark it. Soon you’ll forget they were ever on Utub.

  47. What would be the most effective way to oppose the censorship? Thanks.

    1. This is bigger than us. It appears that we are screwed.

      1. Yep, that’s what they want us to think.

    2. Well, you can begin by acknowledging that “the internet” is bigger than Facebook and Youtube. The corporations that own such spaces can censor speech within them. But they are not the internet. The internet is far, far bigger than Facebook and Youtube.
      So, people who are banned in America are not silenced. They can still be found and still be heard.
      For example, you don’t need Youtube to show a video. There are website plugins that embed videos. And almost anyone can get a website with unlimitted storage for videos. If you need bandwidth, that costs money, but that also means you’ve got people watching.
      I suppose its a measure of how the world has changed during a lifetime. I remember when “Banned in America” was a highly successful bit of marketing copy. One saw it all the time. It was almost a badge of honor. It definitely drew audiences. But, we were a much more rebellious generation than those that followed.

  48. Charles Andrew Robinson Avatar
    Charles Andrew Robinson

    This is not a “New Normal”. This is not normal at all! This is a Fucking Fascist tyranny that any sane person will fight against! https://www.bitchute.com/video/4HYwHZcHWlk/

    1. Exactly right, Charles. This talk of a “new normal” supposes that someone else has the right to tell us what “normal” should look like. We can and will decide this for ourselves.

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