by John Young
If our government were truly concerned about propaganda and disinformation, most of our media would have been shut down long ago.
Americans tend to be misinformed about many things. To a large extent, this isn’t really their fault, because the misinformation is deliberate.
I have occasionally joked that all anyone needs to do to pass the most egregious of laws would be to name them attractively, and then attack anyone who opposes the law as being against that attractive name.
As an extreme example, craft a law which mandates the forced sterilization of anyone who has drawn welfare for more than three years — and name it “the Women’s Civil Rights Act.”
As long as you have dupes or conspirators in the media willing to go along with it, you can easily picture the scene: Al Sharpton is being interviewed by a bleached-blong newsbabe, when she looks at him quizically, seemingly confused, and asks: “Why do you hate women? Why are you against women having civil rights?” When he starts to explain, she interrupts him and asks: “Surely, you aren’t believing these conspiracies are you?”
And so it goes. As far as the general public would understand, the law is about women’s civil rights, when really its purpose is to sterilize our permanent welfare class.
And with our public indoctrination system conveying so little factual information about the Constitution or our history, it would be very very easy to go to college campuses in America and get students to sign a petition like this:
“Whereas all Amendments to our Constitution of Equality were written, proposed and passed by cis-het-white males in the furtherance of Patriarchal Oppression and whereas we should not be forced to endure these oppressions, we support the immediate repeal of the 14th and 19th Amendments which were written by dead white men before women even had a right to vote.”
A great many college students would sign this. If they ask you what those amendments are, you can tell them that the 14th Amendment allowed only white men to hold public office, and that the 19th Amendment was Prohibition and that repealing it is just a formality. They’d believe you and sign, because all the virtue-signalling around the meat of the matter would blind them.
Please understand, governments and our alleged public servants are very cynical people, and they are backed up by a media establishment that does its very best to hide their perfidy.
Net Neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with “neutrality” and it doesn’t do what the general public or most media outlets say that it does. Some of the explanations I have heard from men and women on the street have no basis in reality at all.
One lady told me net neutrality was about keeping countries from going to war over the Internet. While that may be a laudable goal to the extent that wars always disproportionately kill the people who won’t benefit from them, net neutrality has nothing to do with world peace.
Another gentleman told me it was about preventing censorship of “little guys” like small-scale bloggers. Nope, wrong again.
Yet another fellow explained that it was about preventing “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” that would allow rich corporations to have better access than others. That’s sort of true, but backwards. Let me explain.
The core concept of Net Neutrality affects only ISPs — those companies that provide the end user with access to the Internet. Although, in concept, it prevents companies such as Comcast from arbitrarily limiting protocols like BitTorrent or Gnutella, all it requires in practice is the posting of a disclosure document whose veracity cannot be verified by regulators. When is the last time you read a disclosure document, anyway?
But the key issue was bringing Internet providers under the same regulatory scheme as public utilities, such that they had to be operating, like radio stations, in the “public interest” and their license could be pulled for failure to do so.
At first glance this seems benign. But as someone reading this site, you realize 99% of the material here could not be put on the radio without the station’s license being jeopardized.
The insidious nature of this was revealed in late 2016 when then-President Obama signed the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act.” The problem, as our readers certainly know, is that whether a piece of data constitutes “factual information” or “propaganda” is a very arbitrary matter that depends completely on what those in power want you to know.
So the bitter irony is that Net Neutrality was really about two things. First, forcing little old ladies who only use their Internet for Email to subsidize the bandwidth hogs like Netflix. Second, creating an infrastructure actually ALLOWING for censorship under the predictable guise of labeling whatever the government doesn’t want us to know as “propaganda” or “disinformation.”
If our government were truly concerned about propaganda and disinformation, most of our media would have been shut down long ago.
So the fact Net Neutrality has been repealed is actually a very good thing.
Along with this, most of us are now aware of ungoing censorship taking place on the largest platforms in cyberspace, wherein polite and moderate scholars such as Jared Taylor have been kicked off of Twitter. Twitter, of course, is using the usual suspects — the ADL and the SPLC — to help them pick and choose who should be removed.
But it is more than that. Crowdfunding platforms such as Patreon and GoFundMe have long kept people with wrong-think from benefitting from their services. And even retailers with legitimate services have had difficulty using Paypal and credit card processors. Probably the most notable case of Internet censorship is that of the Daily Stormer, whose domain registrar literally cancelled their domain — and it has happened dozens of times.
There is very very very real censorship going on.
While some people have advocated dealing with this by having large Internet companies regulated “as utilities” that is a very bad idea. As with Net Neutrality, that would simply formalize mechanisms for censorship by our enemies.
Proper advocacy, instead, is to make it unlawful for any corporation involved in Internet provision or content to discriminate in its treatment of users or customers on the basis of any LAWFUL speech.
Reasonable people understand some speech is, and ought to be, unlawful. But 99.999% of the current censorship is not for that. It is directed quite specifically at pro-European-American expressions. So that cannot be tolerated.