Orwellian Censorship in US/EU

Will the battle for free speech lead to a civil war?

There’s a cognitive warfare waged by the “blob” — CIA, NATO, State Dept, and the Pentagon. And it involves sophisticated propaganda and a multi billion-dollar censorship industry in order to control the narratives and win the hearts and minds of the global population, especially Americans and Europeans.

However, this is backfiring spectacularly, and is creating an environment ripe for deep polarization and even civil wars.

In this episode, we look into not only the why and how of this information war but also the bigger philosophy of free speech and its limits.

This is a monologue for the channel Geopolitics Demystified. You can watch the video or read the content below:

Content:

“We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression.” — US President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941.

“We have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Think before you post.” – UK Prime Minister Starmer in 2024.

“Who dares not speak his free thought, is a slave” — Greek philosopher Euripides 2000+ years ago.

“If you act as a megaphone for misinformation, the law enforcement will come after you” - Kamala Harris, US Presidential nominee.

Welcome to Geopolitics Demystified. I am your host S.L. Kanthan. We bring in perspectives you do not see or hear in the mainstream media. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe to the channel and share it with your friends.

Today’s topic is Free Speech, a seemingly simple but highly complex issue. Free speech has suddenly become an explosive issue in the US and Europe, with a potential to cause severe disruption, even civil wars. This is quite shocking, since Western countries – especially the US – have prided themselves for their free societies.

For Americans, freedom and liberty are not only defining concepts, but are justifications for their imperialism, endless wars, and their feeling of exceptionalism. Remember how George Bush sold the disastrous war in the Middle East: “They hate us for our freedom.”

And when it comes to demonizing China or Russia, the #1 selling point is… “freedom.”

If the West were a product, “freedom” is its marketing slogan.

Now, that famous brand identity is under serious assault… ironically, by the Western establishment.

Two weeks ago, the CEO of Telegram was arrested because the social media giant was NOT censoring people. Similarly, Elon Musk and X have been vilified over the last year for allowing too much free speech. Regardless of the reasons given by the governments and globalist establishments, these represent real struggles over free speech.

In the UK, people are being arrested and sentenced to many years for social media posts or offensive chants; and journalists and activists like Richard Medhurst, Kit Klarenberg and Sarah Wilkinson have been arrested by Britain for political “thought crimes.”

What is even more bizarre is that when the police show up at a person’s home to make an arrest, they won’t say what the offending social media post was. That’s because the police know they would sound ridiculous on video.

In the Netherlands, some people were sent to jail for sharing politically incorrect memes on PRIVATE chats.

In Germany, the establishment tried to ban AfD, a popular political party. And Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is suing a German citizen who called her the “dumbest foreign minister” on social media.

In France, they tried to ban pro-Gaza protests.

The entire EU has banned all Russian media – a censorship act, which is deprivation of freedom to access information. Europeans have even been arrested for simply voicing support for Russia in the Ukraine conflict.

On various American social media platforms, countless people and groups have been banned, shadow-banned, throttled, or demonetized for simply expressing their belief. The globalist censorship team has devised a new term – malinformation – which means that the information is FACTUAL but is still worthy of getting banned!

There are fact-checkers now – unknown and unelected people – who determine what is right, what is wrong, and what is allowed on social media platforms. This is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984 – the Ministry of Truth. As someone said, there were no fact-checkers, until the truth started coming out.

All of this is a new phenomenon that is the result of the failures of the Western establishment, whose policies are failing economically and geopolitically. Unfortunately, Western elites are just doubling down on their neoliberal and imperialist plans.

Free Speech, Big Picture

Let’s take a detour before going into the details on censorship in the West.

Free speech is a double-edged sword. On one hand, societies cannot advance without free speech and free exchange of ideas. Whether it’s science, economy, philosophy, politics, religion, art or any other topic, people need to be able to share new ideas and have intellectual debates among one another to pursue the most optimal and harmonious path.

As British poet and philosopher John Milton said, “Of all the liberties, give me the liberty to know, to speak, and to argue freely according to conscience.”

Suppressing free speech stifles free flow of ideas and the society itself. Frederick Douglass, a great African American who was once a slave, said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”

This is why free speech is included in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as in the Constitution of most countries, including India, Russia and China. In the US, freedom of speech is mentioned in the First Amendment, right after freedom of religion.

However, every country and society has numerous limits on freedom of speech at many levels.

In the US, the Supreme Court famously said that a person does not have the right to scream fire in a crowded theater. There are also numerous restrictions against defamation, inciting violence, treason etc. In the Russian constitution, there are explicit prohibitions against inciting racial, religious hatred etc.

Even without laws, social mores and norms limit freedom of speech.

Right after learning how to speak, every child learns that he or she cannot say certain words.

When we are with family and friends, we all bite our tongues and stay silent in many situations out of politeness or fear of being reprimanded. In the last two decades, we have all grown to accept PC or political correctness. A wrong word or opinion can get you fired these days. On social media, expressing some ideas can get you banned.

People who have worked for big corporations know the limits of free speech. There is virtually no free speech in corporations. Anyone who publicly criticizes his manager or executives or the company is guaranteed to get fired. Even when corporations – think Big Pharma, junk food, media, law firms, military-industrial complex etc. – have repeatedly committed frauds, there have hardly been any whistleblowers. All sorts of laws prevent people from openly talking about the shenanigans in the corporate world.

Even in politics, how many people have come out to explain how lobbying is essentially legalized bribing?

There are many blatantly criminal and unethical things all around us, and they go on because there is no free speech.

Why some censorship is justified

All that said, some censorship is needed. And it’s very subjective, of course. Each society must figure out the right balance.

The main problem with free speech is abuse. You could see this on social media. Without restrictions, any forum gets filled with degeneracy and filth. Pornography, spam, bots, fake news, sensationalism, scams and even software viruses can flood a platform.

Look at the most popular videos online – they are most likely to be about sex, violence or bling-bling. The average person is not very intellectual.

Even in a moderated platform with rules, people troll and fill up the comment sections with idiocy and logical fallacies.

Outside of the internet, if we just people say whatever they want, the world will be filled with dangerous politicians who fuel hatred, fraudulent corporations with false claims, tabloid media etc.

For developing countries, we can see how the US can start color revolutions to overthrow governments by manipulating the minds of young people. As comedian George Carlin said, “never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”

Finally, whether online or offline, children are always at risk. Thus, every society must protect its kids from degeneracy, brainwashing, grooming, toxic indoctrination etc.

Thus, for a country to enjoy free speech, the elites in power must be ethical and patriotic; and the people must be smart and responsible.

Back to the US

I could see the change in free speech in the US, starting in 2015, when Trump started to send shockwaves in US politics. Later, when Trump won the Republican nomination, censorship of unseen magnitude began. Reddit groups and Facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of members were cancelled. Twitter, which was quite the wild west among mainstream social media, began to deplatform popular voices. Even WordPress removed conservative blogs. Later, Apple and Google blocked Parler, a conservative app, from iPhones and Android smartphones.

To justify this political persecution, they just created new logic and terms like “hate speech.” Suddenly, videos that had been on YouTube for many years disappeared overnight. Some conspiracy theories – not all – became unacceptable.

On many social media, simple and official statistics were deemed hate speech or racist or any one of the many terms in the dictionary of political correctness.

Liberals had been in favor of free speech for many decades. As the famous liberal Noam Chomsky once said, “If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.” The new breed of liberals, however, have turned into snowflakes who need “safe space” where they are not exposed to any dissenting opinions.

Thus, liberals have become the biggest proponents of censorship. Hypocritically, when convenient, they use libertarian logic – “companies like Facebook and Twitter can have any policies they want.” Of course, the same groups have changed their logic now and are now trying to punish X and Elon Musk.

However, all these efforts failed to stop Trump in 2016. After his election, the combined forces of the deep state, NATO, corporations, think tanks, academics, and civil societies began to take unprecedented actions. This is when Obama and others openly started talking about the need for “content moderation,” a euphemism for censorship and thought control.

What is fascinating is that the Western establishment is playing the numbers game with information. For example, many videos that are banned on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. are available on Rumble, Odysee, BitChute etc.

To ban everything would reveal the totalitarian nature, so they are engaging in selective censorship, while keeping track of how many people are stepping out of the box. They have certain metrics for tolerance – they don’t care, say, if 5% of the population believe in an idea that is dangerous to the elite power structure. So, if Rumble and Odysee become a bit too popular, they will be targeted for censorship.

Another clever form of censorship is throttling. This is Elon Musk’s famous saying that “free speech does not mean free reach.”

What this means is that your impressions on social media will be throttled down, if you keep thinking out of the box. So, technically, you are not banned, but fewer people see your social media posts. It’s a bit like letting dissenters go to a forest and scream their lungs out. If nobody hears you, did you really say something?

Look up Mike Benz on X and YouTube. He describes the multibillion-dollar censorship industry that has sprung into action over the last decade.

To the dismay of the trans-Atlantic elites, the so-called “far-right” parties are winning all across Europe. Germany’s AfD just won a statewide election for the first time. In France, Marine Le Pen’s party blew Macron’s party out of the water earlier in 2024. Smaller countries like Hungary and Slovakia are rebelling against the EU behemoth.

There have been massive protests by Europeans over the last few years, although the mainstream media totally ignores them. The Yellow Jackets in France protested for three years, but to no avail. Farmers across Europe have protested repeatedly about the high cost of essentials such as diesel and fertilizer, but the people who feed the world have been ignored and suppressed.

In Germany, Chancellor Scholz has an 85% disapproval rating, but he does not step down or change his policies. In Ukraine, elections have been cancelled, and Zelensky’s military literally kidnaps young men and sends them to the battlefield to die on behalf of the US empire. So much for “democracy” in the garden of Europe.

Why the Western elites are afraid

There are three main reasons why Western elites have lost the trust of their own population.

1)      It’s the economy, stupid. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the US economy has been terrible for a majority of the population. The US government has been able to maintain the façade of wealth by borrowing a staggering $25 trillion in the last 15 years. As for Europe, its economy has been stagnant, and the GDP-per-capita of most European countries have fallen way behind the US.

2)      Geopolitics. The West has been stuck in endless hot wars and trade wars and sanctions, trying to desperately hold on to their hegemony. There is no rules-based order, except for in the US propaganda. Plus, most of the imperialists’ plans have failed – especially the big ones regarding Russia, China and the Middle East. The US blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, funding neo-Nazis in Ukraine, assisting in the bombing of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza etc. have not helped the US in any way. Russia’s economy is booming; and China is just a few steps away from attaining semiconductor sovereignty, after which, it’s game over for the US. Meanwhile, BRICS is expanding and de-dollarization is accelerating. As Trump recently warned, without the global reserve currency status of the dollar, the US will become a third world country.

3)      Wokeism. After the 2008 financial crisis, liberals in the West started the Occupy movement. The Western elites wanted to distract the liberals from the class war. Hence, the social engineering movements that are obsessed with sexuality. However, this has backfired with conservatives and centrists.

The Censorship Complex

Over the last decade, the “blob” – primarily made up of the CIA, Pentagon, US State Department, and NATO -- have built a vast multibillion-dollar censorship industry that is comprised of all the major institutions: governments, tech companies, media, think tanks, academia, special interest groups etc.

As Twitter Files revealed, the alphabet soup agencies like the FBI, NSA, DNI and DHS work with tech companies in multiple ways to censor people. On one hand, they have a direct backdoor to some of these social media platforms to monitor millions of posts in real time. So, anyone or any trend that is deemed a threat in this information war can be stifled or banned. In some other cases, these agencies send a target list to the social media companies, which are also filled with ex-employees of these government agencies.

When a Chinese app like TikTok allows too much free speech, US politicians scream about “CCP” and threaten to ban the app, until it bows to censorship demands. How ironic.

NATO is openly working with companies like Lockheed Martin and Google to win this “Cognitive Warfare” – that’s the term they use. All the big academic institutions like Stanford University are employing their smartest people to develop AI programs to censor people and ideas in real time. The next goal is pre-censorship.

The FBI and counterpart agencies in Europe are targeting journalists and influencers – Scott Ritter, for example – who are speaking out against the Empire.

The US Congress is openly spending hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-China propaganda. Of course, when the US spreads lies, that is called “countering disinformation.”

In the US, they need the pretense of freedom, so the censorship is more sophisticated. In Europe, they simply ban all Russian media or arrest people. The EU Chief Ursula von der Leyen went overboard and declared that “misinformation and disinformation” are greater threats than wars. No wonder, NATO is pushing the world closer to WW3.

Propaganda Complex

Interestingly, the group that is spending billions of dollars on global censoring is also spending a lot of money on its own propaganda. The mainstream media is the biggest propaganda tool, but there are also social media influencers, think tanks, professors, analysts, NGOs, human rights organizations, Hollywood, tech companies etc. There are even troll farms like NAFO, which is likely funded by NATO to spread anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine propaganda on social media. There are even special groups, in the West, dedicated to manipulating Wikipedia.

Conclusion

English philosopher John Stuart Mill said that, “All mankind would be no more justified in silencing one person, than he would be justified in silencing mankind.”

However, in the US and Europe, the establishment is trying to silence almost half the population. This is not going to end well.

So, what is the solution?

First, fix the economy. Move away from neoliberalism and financialization. Increase the wages and benefits of workers, and reduce the cost of living.

Second, stop the aggression and perpetual wars. Make peace with Russia and China. Give up on the dream of global domination. A peaceful world automatically means less propaganda and censorship.

Third, focus on fostering a wholesome society that values traditions, religion, spirituality, culture, education, and family. Less degeneracy and more harmony please.

Right now, the entire Western society is on the verge of collapse. Does it have the wisdom to admit its mistakes, stop itself and change course? We will find out soon.

• S.L. Kanthan

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