Ahh, those exciting and hair-graying Congressional and Senate “Hearings." Anyone who’s attended them and responds to a query honestly will tell you they’re mostly show -- performance rituals created by politicians with legislative agendas in order to generate buzz via the lapdog media. The “hearings” are tightly controlled, calling on handpicked “witnesses” to say things the politicians intend to have promoted, and, unless one watches them with a critical eye and awareness of the corrupt game, it’s difficult to get any valuable information out of them.
But if one does watch with a critical eye, sometimes that information can be shockingly revealing about political agendas. For example, on Wednesday, January 17, folks studying the appearances of high-ups from Facebook, Twitter, and Google/Alphabet not only saw confirmed precisely what conservative and libertarian reporters have been saying for two years (even as they were dismissed as conspiracy theorists by the pop media), they saw even more. They saw a display of anti-journalistic US fascism tied to a law promoted and passed in the last days of the Obama Administration, a display so monumental, one hopes people will spread the word.
As CNBC’s John Shinal reports:
Facebook, Google and Twitter told Congress Wednesday that they've gone beyond screening and removing extremist content and are creating more anti-terror propaganda to pre-empt violent messages at the source.
“Pre-empt violent messages at the source.” That’s a lot of verbal baggage to unpack.
For example, what does the reporter mean by “pre-empt”?
What do they mean by “creating anti-terror content”?
How do they define “terror content”?
And, if we can backtrack for a moment, what do they mean when they say that they’ve gone “beyond screening and removing ‘extremist’ content”?
Let’s start with that last question first. Almost two years ago, conservative and libertarian bloggers, vloggers, and journalists began telling people that their videos were being demonetized on Google-owned YouTube, and their posts were being “shadow-banned” on Twitter.
The dinosaur media was silent. And who would expect them to cover such stories? After all, the small-government upstarts were helping tear apart the desiccated, decaying body of the old-guard, left-biased media every day, with every video or Tweet they produced.
So it was no surprise when FoxNews finally got out the word about Facebook censoring conservatives in 2016. And it was no surprise when, last week, Project Veritas exposed the shadow-banning by Twitter and even by Reddit.
So the answer to our last question is clear. “What, to Google, Twitter, and Facebook, is ‘extremist content’?” It’s often reporting by folks who support small-government, conservative, libertarian, pro-individualist principles. It parallels the 2009 insult to free speech and individualism undertaken by the Department of Homeland Security when it issued a release to government agents to beware of folks with bumper stickers on their cars promoting: the Bill of Rights, pro-life ideas, abolishing the income tax, eliminating or not paying for the United Nations, and the Gadsden Flag.
And the moves by the corporate thought police have been clear as well.
But what of the new agenda, as explained to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, on Wednesday?
Well, we know that the social media “gurus” are very willing to broad-brush conservative and libertarian posts as not only “extremist”, but also “terroristic”. That’s clear. And the gurus are also more than willing to “screen and remove” content they don’t like – without telling people about it until they have to admit it. Okay. We get that and understood that months before the corporations admitted it.
But what of the new wrinkle regarding “creating more ‘anti-terror’” propaganda, as CNBC reports it?
That’s more than just the 10,000-plus swarm of Google-ites whom the corporation plans to hire to smother dissent. It’s an active agenda to literally create news.
Now, free-market supporters, and perhaps some leftist critics might protest here, and say, “These are private companies, not the government. They can do what they want and rise or fall economically because of it.”
And that is certainly true. Social media platform Gab.ai is blossoming exponentially thanks to the dissatisfaction of conservative and libertarian Twitter users giving up on the big blue bird.
But this is where, if one has been watching the moves of the US government since early 2016, one knows that in the last sixty days of the Obama Administration, a devious and dangerous bill was rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that now allows the feds to subsidize and work with “media outlets” that help the US government “counter dangerous propaganda”. The bill, called the “Portman-Murphy Anti-Propaganda Act”, and about which I have previously written, removes the barriers between so-called “news” and “social media” organizations and the US government. It also asks security agencies to “look into” and counter news sites or bloggers whom the politicians see as “Anti-American”. (Please refer to the list created by Homeland Security for easy reference.)
This is not only not a good thing, it is blatantly anti-constitutional.
And guess who supported that bill?
That would be none other than Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, he who has chosen this week to spout off about Donald Trump poking fun at the mistakes and lies propagated by the dinosaur media. Jeff Flake, the man who supports using the federal government to bail out that dinosaur media, and use his new social media friends to “counter” ideas he doesn’t like.
The hearings are over. But the fight against this fascistic development has just begun. Keep your eyes peeled, but remember, it might be less than useful to count on the government-connected media giants to tell you the truth.