We are in an information war right now. The powers-that-be are trying to shut down all dissident voices. These power players include the government, the corporate media, the social media giants, and big business in general.
There is a certain extent that media and corporations are complicit in shutting down anti establishment voices because they themselves feel threatened. If you are a big company and you dare to go against the grain in the current climate, you could feel major repercussions just from the government. This especially becomes the case when you receive any government money or any kind of favoritism.
It is tempting for libertarians and conservatives to want to quash censorship by relying on the government. It is the only way that many of them see a solution. But it is important to resist this temptation, as it is antithetical to liberty. Also, why would you rely on the very people in government to make this right when they are the ones trying to silence you?
The establishment is getting its revenge on the people who dared to elect Donald Trump in 2016. They have been fighting an ongoing war against Trump since 2015. Even though Trump surrounded himself by a bunch of swamp people, he has dared to tell the truth at times. He has provided a much-needed voice to the underclass, or as Hillary Clinton would call them, the deplorables.
The war against Trump has mostly been against Trump for the last 5 years. They ridicule him. They lie about him. They make a caricature of him. They paint him in a bad light at every possible turn. It’s not that Donald Trump doesn’t have his flaws. He has many. But the establishment and its media will try to make Trump look as bad as possible virtually all of the time.
Before Trump took office, there were fake allegations that Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election. Some of his closest advisors were prosecuted for things that most people couldn’t even tell you about. The truth is that they were prosecuted because they were a threat to the establishment. They were a threat to reveal truths about the swamp, and they were a threat because some of them wanted to reduce the U.S. empire.
There were continuous allegations against Trump for four years in office. He was impeached in December 2019 for a phone call with the president of Ukraine where Trump asked him to look into the Biden family (and for good reason). When I wrote a summary of 2020, I actually forgot to include the impeachment saga, as the Senate did not acquit him until February 2020. Isn’t it odd that it never came up once as a question in one of the main presidential debates?
Trump seemed to slide by everything. Sure, the establishment media convinced half the population that Trump is a horrible person and that most of our problems are a result of him. But close to the other half of the country remained in line with Trump, or at least sympathized with him. They understood that Trump was a little different from the ruling class, and Trump himself had helped to show that the ruling elite were in it for themselves.
After the November 2020 election, Trump continued to claim that he won. He continued to claim that there was massive election fraud, and a great percentage of his followers believed it then and still believe it now.
On January 6, 2021, it came to a climax when hundreds of thousands of people showed up in Washington DC to protest the certification of Joe Biden as the next president. The bizarre twist came when people went past the barriers and were on the grounds of the Capitol building. It is hard to say if there were outside agitators who initially led the way, but I have no doubt that there were some Trump supporters who actually entered the Capitol building.
In the grand scheme of things, there may have been a few hundred protesters to enter the building out of possibly a million people.
It was a bad idea for several reasons. Unfortunately, this is what got all of the attention. Because a few hundred people got goaded into entering the Capitol building, it sparked a full movement of censorship against anti establishment forces.
The politicians and their media lie constantly. Sometimes they don’t outright lie, but they propagandize constantly to distort the truth. It is the same thing as they do to get support for a war. George W. Bush never actually said that Iraq was responsible for the attacks on 9/11, but he often conflated the two things to give the impression that Saddam Hussein was partially responsible.
In this case, they say that Trump incited violence and insurrection. The media is trying to paint anyone who is a Trump supporter as some kind of domestic terrorist. This is especially laughable given the media’s support for the massive violence that occurred in the summer of 2020 in major cities across America.
So anyone who attended the Trump rally/ protest is being painted as a bad person, even if they did not step foot on the Capitol building. There is a full attack to shun people from society who in any way supports Trump or even questions the establishment and its motives.
From 2015 to January 6, 2021, most of the effort was to get Trump and bring him down. He was the face of the anti establishment movement. On January 6, 2021, the war shifted from Trump to his 75 million supporters. Maybe the war was always really against his supporters, but up until this time, it was mostly personalized against Trump and those close to Trump. Now it is against a whole segment of society.
An Echo Chamber
While I don’t want the government to control social media, I am highly critical of what is going on. We should demand that these companies get no government funding for anything.
I see some people cheering on the censorship. These are people that don’t like Trump. They don’t understand what they are cheering for.
Companies like Facebook and Twitter have banned Trump. They would rather do this and lose money from people who will no longer use their platform. Perhaps the scariest thing is the actions taken against Parler, which is a competitor. Apple, Google, and Amazon have all taken steps to close down Parler. As of right now, Parler’s website is not functional.
It’s not that Parler allows threats of violence on its platform. It’s that it is a place where people are free to post what they want as long as they aren’t inciting any kind of violence. But because it is becoming a place for conservatives and libertarians to go, it had to be shut down. The powers-that-be can’t have dissident voices out there.
To be clear, it’s not even that Parler is a platform for conservatives. It’s just that it is attracting people who are being shut out of Facebook and Twitter.
The people who are cheering on this censorship apparently want to live in an echo chamber. They don’t want to hear any opposing views. It might confuse them.
If you ban contrarian views from Facebook and Twitter, then people are going to find some other outlet. The establishment can keep trying to attack the competition, but people are going to find a way to be heard, even if they are just being heard by others who agree with them.
Conservatives and libertarians understand opposing views for the most part, even if they don’t agree with them. It can be hard to understand why people may hold these views, but the views are understood.
The same can’t be said for much of the left and for the establishment in general. The ruling elite may understand, but the average person on the street doesn’t understand these anti establishment views. They just listen to the caricatures that are drawn up by the establishment media.
There are tens of millions of people out there who get 99% of their information from the establishment media. They watch the news on television. They read establishment sources on the internet. A few may still read the newspaper. They are bombarded with the same views over and over again. So when they hear it repeated a hundred times that Trump incited violence, then it must be true to them.
There is a total lack of curiosity. They may see the occasional dissident voice on Facebook. They can’t even entertain the possibility of another opinion being on to something.
This is why someone who isn’t in hysterics over the coronavirus must be evil or stupid. They have heard hundreds of times from their trusted media that the virus is very deadly and dangerous and we must obey the mask mandates and social distancing as directed.
To be sure, we are better off today than in previous decades. 30 or 40 years ago, you watched television and read the newspaper. It was a complete echo. Now there are alternative news sources, but you have to be a little curious and open-minded to look at them.
The reason there is such disunity is because a lot of people don’t believe the lies of the ruling class. There is seeming unity in North Korea. There was unity in the Soviet Union. Nobody questioned the official narrative or else they risked being erased from society, whether it be by death or a concentration camp.
Now, the ruling elite are trying to erase those who don’t accept the official narrative. They can’t get away with concentration camps or death in most cases, so they turn to censorship. They want to shut people up. They want to ban information. They want to scare people into silence.
In the long run, it isn’t going to work. It’s not to say that we don’t have a tough road ahead of us.
As I’ve been repeating for several months, the tens of millions of Trump supporters aren’t going away. You can pretend that they don’t exist, but it doesn’t make it so. While many of them may be misguided in some aspects and not fully able to articulate a position of liberty, they do understand that the ruling elite is their enemy. This is an important realization that the other half of the country does not understand. Instead, the people who preach unity and dutifully obey their rulers are the serfs. They are enslaving themselves. They are helping to enslave all of us to a certain degree. They are being duped, and they have no idea. They can’t see through the echo chamber. When they are lied to enough on a constant basis, they can’t comprehend that they may be being lied to. It would rattle their entire worldview.
The empire (the establishment) has struck back. They have gotten their revenge in 2020 and the beginning of 2021. They got the hysteria they wanted with a virus. They got unprecedented government controls. Now they are painting Trump supporters as violent people. They are trying to block the free flow of information.
In the long run, it isn’t going to work. There are too many people who have woken up to the reality that the ruling class is not working for them. The people in the echo chamber will occasionally hear alternative viewpoints. A few of them will be rattled and will have to rethink their view of the world.
While part of human nature wants to trust people and seek safety, I believe the thirst for liberty will overwhelm this. Liberty is part of human nature. That is an idea that cannot be permanently silenced.