The Ukraine-Russia-USA Conflict, Part 13a: Western Censorship, Cancel-Culture and Neo-McCarthyism
After having discussed the elements and the overall types of propaganda in the previous two parts (see parts 4 and 6 for earlier discussions of Western-Ukrainian propaganda), it is now time to turn to censorship, the other and complementary side of manufacturing consent for the 1% and their agendas by way of which oftentimes (more) truthful counternarratives and their tellers are being suppressed. In this part, I will examine political and state censorship.
15.0 A Legal Preamble
From a legal perspective, all forms of censorship that I will discuss in articles 13a, 13b and 13c contravene or violate articles 18 and 19 of the 1948 United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Since the “national security state” was already in existence in the 1960s, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, although reiterating these rights, unfortunately already diluted and restricted them with some very stretchable “public health or morals” and “national security” paragraphs:
Article 18
1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.
2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
[…]
Article 19
1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
3. The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
(a) For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
(b) For the protection of national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals.
The earlier European Convention on Human Rights which went into force in 1953 has highly similar and abusable ‘national security’ passages built in:
ARTICLE 9
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience
and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or
belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and
in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship,
teaching, practice and observance.
2. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be
subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are
necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety,
for the protection of public order, health or morals, or for the
protection of the rights and freedoms of others.ARTICLE 10
Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right
shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart
information and ideas without interference by public authority
and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States
from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema
enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it
duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities,
conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and
are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national
security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention
of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for
the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing
the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for
maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
More recently, free speech has become even more restricted and perverted in in the West and ironically mainly by so-called liberals but de facto pro-censorship closet authoritarians:
Since both censorship and propaganda serve the same purpose of manufacturing consent for the 1% and their agendas, it should not come as a surprise that they also share the same sources by which we can likewise order censorship.
15.1 Political and State Censorship
The eminent problem with letting politicians, the state or such institutions censor is that there is 1) often a conflict of interest between their political agendas and truth or truthfulness and that 2) their political agendas usually have a higher priority than truth or truthfulness. The consequence of this is that political and state censorship and censorers will usually bury truth in favor of the fulfillment of political agendas which serve the parasitic 1% in some way or manner — and even if that means going against their own alleged laws, principles or values.
Concerning protection from censorship, the CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (CFR) which was proclaimed in 2000 and which went into force in 2009 for instance states the following:
Article 10
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.
2. The right to conscientious objection is recognised, in accordance with the national laws governing the exercise of this right.
Article 11
Freedom of expression and information
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.
But the EU broke these laws and values during the Ukraine Russia USA conflict by banning Russian state affiliated media while letting US and Ukrainian state affiliated do their propaganda unimpeded:
As pointed out by others, the above measures are illegal under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. But minor matters such as legality and illegality are irrelevant and lose out even in the oh so liberal EU compared to manufacturing consent via political censorship:
This “censorship is freedom” Orwellian doublethink is a further sign of the implementation of an Orwellian world order and of the West going increasingly insane:
Through this censorship regime, the West effectively covers up reporting about its own crimes:
For more input on censorship by those affected by it, see the following interview:
15.1.1 Imprisonment and Murder as Censorship
Political censorship can also be implemented by imprisoning or murdering those who speak truth to power and who provide a more truthful counternarrative that undermines the 1%’s manufacturing of consent.
In the West, the most obvious case of censorship via imprisonment that may yet turn into censorship via murder consists of the imprisonment of Julian Assange, the West’s political prisoner No1 — a particular irony on May 3rd World Press Freedom Day:
More sickening irony, satire and self-congratulatory bullshit on the occasion of the White House Correspondents Dinner (#WHCD):
The following comments also applies to Trevor Noah who can likewise be considered as part of the “US Bernie/AOC” weak- or pseudo-‘left’ (#fraudsquad) which routinely falls in line with the US empire and national security state:
As for the British Home Secretary Priti ‘Ugly on the Inside’ Patel who will rule on the Assange extradition and why it is a foregone conclusion that she will rule in favor of Assange being extradited to his war criminal oppressors in the USA:
And lo and behold, somehow who spreads outrageous lies about Julian Assange flies the Ukrainian flag which does not come as a surprise in light of the heavy coordination of Ukrainian with US propaganda:
On June 17, British regime representatives announced that Assange would be extradited to the US regime. Critical reactions, especially by other independent journalists, included the following:
The British home secretary has formally approved the extradition of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to the United States, in the latest development in a dangerous and misguided criminal prosecution that has the potential to criminalize national security journalism in the United States.
Previously, a major coalition of civil liberties organizations, including Freedom of the Press Foundation, implored U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the case against Assange in the name of protecting the rights of journalists everywhere. So, too, have the editors of major news outlets such as The New York Times and Washington Post.
By continuing to extradite Assange, the Biden DOJ is ignoring the dire warnings of virtually every major civil liberties and human rights organization in the country that the case will do irreparable damage to basic press freedom rights of U.S. reporters.
[…]
You don’t have to like Assange or his political opinions at all to grasp the dangerous nature of this case for journalists everywhere, either. Even if you don’t consider him a “journalist,” much of the activity described in the charges against him is common newsgathering practices. A successful conviction would potentially make receiving classified information, asking for sources for more information, and publishing certain types of classified information a crime. Journalists, of course, engage in all these activities regularly.
There is some historical irony in the fact that this extradition announcement falls during the anniversary of the Pentagon Papers trial, which began with the Times publication of stories based on the legendary leak on June 13, 1971, and continued through the seminal Supreme Court opinion rejecting prior restraint on June 30, 1971.
In the months and years following that debacle, whistleblower (and FPF co-founder) Daniel Ellsberg became the first journalistic source to be charged under the Espionage Act. What many do not know is that the Nixon administration attempted to prosecute Times reporter Neil Sheehan for receiving the Pentagon Papers as well — under a very similar legal theory the Justice Department is using against Assange.
As mentioned by Glenn Greenwald, there are indeed some marked differences between the liberal ‘left’ and the actual left:
Then there is also censorship via murder, as for instance once again committed by the rightwing extremist Israeli Zionist regime (see part 14b for more about that):
Another such case is that of Patrick Tillman:
A third case of censorship by murder:
15.1.2 Neo-McCarthyism
The very short story about the US Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–1957) is that he was ultimately a an alcoholic who, before drinking himself to death, destroyed people’s lives during a Red Scare and in a communist witch hunt that he himself did not take very seriously and that served mainly selfish purposes such as becoming more popular, profiled and powerful as a politician.
His political legacy is (Neo-)McCarthyism which could perhaps be defined as follows:
I would also include additional aspects of propaganda in McCarthyism such as the “Nazi-Style Slandering and Guilt-Tripping” that I discussed in part 12, section 14.2., and one could furthermore regarding McCarthyism as an aspect of the national security state cancel culture that is directed against typically left or progessive and anti-war individuals who do not obey the insane dictates of the national security state.
McCarthyism furthermore falls under the category of ad hominem attacks that are used to censor, cancel, slander, smear and exert epistemic violence.
A key event that triggered the latest and third re-iteration of McCarthyism (the second one was under Reagan) was the loss of the much despised establishment hack, Wall Street shill and Libya war criminal Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential elections — a loss which the totally bonkers neoliberal Democrat establishment around the parasitic 1% figure Hillary Clinton tried to excuse and rationalize with a great Russian conspiracy that led to the win of Trump:
From Peter Daou, who has worked for the Clinton camp in the past but who has thoroughly rejected these ties to the liberal-centrist establishment and turned into a leftist or progressive:
And it was Clinton herself who was the architect of that conspiracy theory:
Clinton therefore also falls into that circle of liberal deceivers who prattle about the dangers of disinformation while disseminating precisely such disinformation:
From Glenn Greenwald, as quoted in part 10, section 12.5, on neoliberal MSM now recanting on that Russian conspiracy or “Russiagate” which they themselves propagated for the Democratic establishment and more so for the US national security state:
Journalist Aaron Maté confirms and shows that MSM not only lie but that they even lie some more when they retract that first lie and when it becomes outright impossible to maintain it while spreading yet further 1%-serving lies in other respects:
So overall, it is once again an Orwellian reversal that happened here in terms of the genuinely crazy or lying conspiracists and McCarthyists accusing others of conspiring with ‘the enemy’:
A March 2022 episode between the chicken-hawkish Neo-McCarthyist Mitt Romney and the anti-war politician Tulsi Gabbard serves as another example for that most recent version of McCarthyism:
Behold the ridiculousness:
Even more examples of contemporary Neo-McCarthyism in the USA include the following:
Whenever war or geopolitical tensions spark jingoistic fervor, there are always efforts by certain factions to try to stamp out dissent, flatten nuance and historical context into a simple black-and-white narrative, and use the moment to settle scores and advance their careers.
The last time we in the West lived through this was a little over twenty years ago, when outrage over the September 11 atrocity quickly led to a militaristic climate in which only the most extreme and reckless military responses were given a platform. The luckiest of those who objected, or who counseled calm, caution, and peaceful solutions, were mocked and ignored. The less lucky were called traitors and terrorist sympathizers, even terrorists themselves, and accused of disloyalty and hurting the country, as the president warned that you were either “with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
Those who deviated in any way from the approved line — including any who inquired into the motives of the terrorists and their supporters — were accused of “rationalizing support for these hate-filled fanatics,” of spreading their propaganda, of being one of the “appeasers,” and they were attacked, censored, even fired. Right-wing columnists cheered that “the portions of the left that oppose [military action] will go the way of the America Firsters during the last war.”
The result was a rash of disasters and foolish policy choices that all sensible people came to regret. Overseas, $8 trillion worth of US wealth was poured into a “war on terror” that destroyed two countries, one of which had no connection to the attack whatsoever, and killed nearly a million people worldwide (including more than seven times as many Americans as died on September 11), while displacing 38 million other people. The US government set up a worldwide system of torture dungeons, whose inmates included innocent people it had mistakenly kidnapped, and traumatized entire societies with killer drones and covert death squads that wiped out whole families and villages at a stroke, with no warning. After decades, all of this came to be almost universally viewed as a terrible, shameful mistake.
Twenty years later, we’re now witnessing a very similar sequence of events playing out, with potentially even more horrifying consequences.
In case you did not know yet:
Two days after the recent monkey- or smallpox reports — Russiaaah!:
As demonstrated by all these examples and as analyzed by Caitlin Johnstone, McCarthyists are not the slightest bit interested in truth. These “tribalists” instead take loyalty to the US empire over truth and truthfulness, independently of how many crimes it commits, how many lies it tells and how morally rotten it is. They probably also project their loyalty-based thinking on others who prioritize truthfulness, falsely believing that if people such as Caitlin Johnstone, myself or others are disloyal to the US empire, that they must be the loyal servants of Putin or Russia:
But due to falsely prioritizing misplaced loyalty to the insane and very dangerous US empire over truthfulness, they will never understand certain fundamental truths, including the one about the McCarthyist mind rot that has poisoned their minds:
Snowden the Russian agent — not so much. But it is a good way to distract from your own sins:
15.1.3 Politically Motivated Financial Censorship
Another type of political censorship is (politically motivated) financial censorship such as the following:
No Prior Notice or Explanation
There was no prior notice sent nor was Consortium News afforded any due process. A PayPal customer service agent confirmed in a telephone call on Sunday that the “back office” gave no specific reason for “permanently limiting” CN‘s account other than that an “investigation and review” of CN‘s “history found some potential risk associated with this account.”
She said the “potential risk” from CN is “not exactly specified by the back office.” The agent said, “It has something to do with the history of this account.” Asked whether any agency, government or private, or any individual had complained to PayPal about CN, the customer service agent replied, “I don’t see any existing case.”
The agent could not explain why Consortium News was given no notice or any due process, but promised to ask the “back office” to contact CN to explain.
[…]
PayPal was sued in California in January in a class action for similarly shutting down accounts.
In June, the same thing happened to Wyatt Reed. Once again, note the US ‘national security’ state connections:
Once again, no proper explanation was given by the censorers:
The same thing happened to Jackson Hinkle and for the same reason — authoritarian political censorship:
15.1.4 The US Ministry of Truth (“Disinformation Governance Board”)
In Orwell’s 1984, “The Ministry of Truth […] concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts” (ch. 1) or rather with manufacturing consent for the parasitic 1% in these areas. Towards the end of April 2022, the creation of such a Ministry of Truth — the so-called “Disinformation Governance Board” — was announced in the USA:
Truths that go against the lies of the national security state are thereby mislabeled as disinformation by professional disinformers and to be censored:
Obama: “But while content moderation [i.e. censorship] can limit the distribution of [especially for the 1%] clearly dangerous content, it doesn’t go far enough.”
Bush (who is known for lying about Iraq and other things): “What’s really troubling is how much misinformation there is and the capacity of people to spread all kinds of untruth,” [Bush] said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that. I know what I’m going to do about it — I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, any of that stuff.”
Increasingly irrelevant corporate journalists who likewise manufacture consent and who would benefit from such a Ministry of Truth are of course also among the cheerleaders for such an Orwellian institution. They also do their usual manufacturing consent thing to those who have good reasons to object to such an Orwellian institution:
15.1.4a On the Department of Homeland Security and Alejandro Mayorkas
Alejandro Mayorkas is the current (Feb. 2021-) and 7th Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which is a “war on/of terror” creation from the Bush jr. regime, and it is interestingly and disconcertingly that ‘national security’ institution of the US ‘national security’ state which is supposed to house the Disinformation Governance Board/Ministry of Truth:
The even crazier thing about this is that it is being done by Democrats who are embracing ideas from the Bush jr. neocon era:
As pointed out by others, the above already contains the first likely false claim of Mayorkas since US authorites already lied about the National Securty Agency (NSA) supposedly not monitoring or spying on US citizens:
This article confirms that Mayorkas was lying:
CNN host Dana Bash sat down with Mayorkas on May 1, in an interview titled “Bash presses Mayorkas about ‘1984’ comparisons to disinformation board.”
The CNN segment amounted to a defense of DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board, which Mayorkas minimized as a “small working group within the Department of Homeland Security,” supposedly with limited power.
“Will American citizens be monitored?” Bash asked, in regard to this disinformation board.
“No,” Mayorkas said firmly.
“Guarantee that?” Bash responded.
“We in the Department of Homeland Security don’t monitor American citizens,” he insisted.
This statement is blatantly false. DHS’ monitoring of American citizens is very well documented, by dozens of mainstream media outlets and civil liberties organizations.
But instead of pushing back against this clear lie, the CNN host echoed the DHS secretary’s totally false claim.
“You don’t,” Bash replied in agreement. “But will this board change that?” she added.
“No, no, no,” Mayorkas repeated.
This is all completely, categorically false.
The Intercept obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request showing how DHS has spied on activists protesting police brutality in the Black Lives Matter movement since at least 2014.
NBC 7 obtained DHS documents in 2019 that showed that “the U.S. government created a secret database of activists, journalists, and social media influencers tied to the migrant caravan and in some cases, placed alerts on their passports.”
In 2020, the New York Times itself reported that the “Department of Homeland Security deployed helicopters, airplanes and drones over 15 cities where demonstrators gathered to protest the death of George Floyd.”
Even more outrageously and idiotically, Mayorkas claimed that the US Minitrue — an instrument of censorship — would be used to “safeguard the right of free speech”(!), a civil liberty. This is nothing but a classic Orwellian 180° reversal of the truth that could be added seamlessly to the other Orwellian slogans of the party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
CENSORSHIP IS FREE SPEECH
As once again correctly pointed out by others, it is instead The First Amendment of the US Constitution that guarantees free speech:
On the clear and present danger of allowing such a Ministry of Truth (i.e. of political and state propaganda) to exist and on what it would actually do:
There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation. As Politico’s Jack Schafer wrote:
Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who thinks the government is capable of telling the truth? Our government produces lies and disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with facts….Making the federal government the official custodian of truth would be like Brink’s giving a safe-cracker a job driving an armored car.
The purpose of Homeland Security agents is to propagandize and deceive, not enlighten and inform. The level of historical ignorance and stupidity required to believe that U.S. Security State operatives are earnestly devoted to exposing and decreeing truth — as CNN’s Brian Stelter evidently believes, given that he praised this new government program as “common sense” — is off the charts. As Jameel Jaffer, formerly of the ACLU and now with the Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute put it, most troubling is “the fact that the board is housed at DHS, an especially opaque agency that has run roughshod over civil liberties in the past.”
And in case you should erroneously still think that a “Minitrue” (Newspeak for “Ministry of Truth”) under the ‘Democrat’ Joe Biden is a good idea, consider how that institution will we abused even more under an even worse Republican regime that is even more opposed to science or proper methods:
15.1.4b Nina Jankowicz and the Ministry of Truth
On Nina Jankowicz, the liberal cultist head of the US Ministry of Truth:
On her past as an effective disinformer and on why she clearly qualifies to head a dystopian US Ministry of Truth:
[T]here’s no need to engage in hypotheticals to understand the dangers. One has to only consider the past of Nina Jankowicz, the head of the new disinformation board.
Jankowicz’s experience as a disinformation warrior includes her work with StopFake, a US government-funded “anti-disinformation” organization founded in March 2014 and lauded as a model of how to combat Kremlin lies. Four years later, StopFake began aggressively whitewashing two Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups with a long track record of violence, including war crimes.
Today, StopFake is an official Facebook fact-checking partner, which gives it the power to censor news, while Jankowicz is America’s disinformation czar.
If the Biden administration is serious about combating threats such as white supremacy, perhaps it should first reflect on the old Roman question: Who will guard the guardians?
StopFake was founded right after Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan uprising ousted the country’s president and swept a new, US-backed government into power. Formed by professors and students from the Kyiv Mohyla Journalism School, StopFake presented itself as a plucky, grassroots group wielding hard facts and semi-permanent smirks as it shredded Russian propaganda. It gained notoriety by producing slick videos hosted by dynamic disinformation warriors debunking the Moscow lies of the day.
Western reporters — and checkbooks — were paying attention. Shortly after its creation, StopFake began receiving funding from Western governments, including the National Endowment for Democracy — an organization mainly funded by the US Congress — and the British embassy in Ukraine. It was also supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. (StopFake has run numerous episodes that cover Soros but fail to disclose this potential conflict of interest — a violation of basic tenets of journalism.)
Among StopFake’s hosts was Jankowicz, a graduate of Bryn Mawr and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service who was already part of the burgeoning disinformation warrior industry while in Ukraine as a Fulbright Clinton Public Policy Fellow. On January 29, 2017, she hosted StopFake Episode 117, whose lead story dealt with a perennial obsession of Russian propaganda: Ukraine’s volunteer battalions.
The following report revealed that Jankowicz is furthermore associated with the British national security state:
Despite Jankowicz’s professional activities and public statements providing such ample fodder to critics, even her most vocal detractors overlooked her résumé’s most troubling aspect — namely, that she serves on the advisory board of Open Information Partnership (OIP), a British Foreign Office psychological warfare operation.
[…]
OIP’s spartan official website sparingly styles the endeavor as a “diverse network” of “investigative journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and fact checkers, active in over 20 countries,” which since February 2019 has “been standing firm against the rising tide of disinformation — in the news, on social media and across our public discourse — which we believe to be an existential threat to democracy.”
Little further elucidation of OIP’s activities and objectives is offered, but its founding “Partners” provide cause for concern. They include NATO propaganda offshoot The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Zinc Network, a British communications agency managing covert psyops campaigns — many explicitly targeting Muslims — the world over for a variety of clients, including the U.K. Home Office, U.S. intelligence cutout USAID, and the Pentagon.
On the “best practices” talking point that Jankowicz also put forward as a pretty facade:
Members of this nexus are provided training in “best practice in exposing and countering disinformation” across a range of disciplines, from “open source research through to viral video production and digital targeting as well as cyber security, libel and data compliance.” Participating entities then increase the “pace, scale and quality” of their output and more optimally target audiences “vulnerable” to Russian propaganda in tandem via “campaign co-creation…[linking] the organisations across borders.”
Which would be all well and good, except the leaked files make abundantly clear that OIP isn’t actually concerned with countering “fake news” at all but is, in reality, energized by a desire to conceal facts and bothersome perspectives the British state doesn’t want in the public domain, via manipulation, distortion, and lies.
Take, for instance, the following passage in one document, which laments without irony that one of the key barriers to combating Russian “disinformation” is that “certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true [emphasis added].”
“Responding to inconvenient truths, as opposed to pure propaganda, is naturally more problematic,” the file explained.
Consider too the footsoldiers deployed by OIP to “respond” to such “inconvenient truths.” One leaked file offers appraisals of 56 organizations identified by the Foreign Office as potential network members, including OIP founder Bellingcat. Eliot Higgins’ much-venerated crack squad of laptop jockeys was judged to be “somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”
[…]
The leaked documents contain numerous troubling examples of OIP at work.
For example, in Ukraine, it trained 12 online influencers “to counter Kremlin-backed messaging through innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models,” helping their “compelling content” reach “millions of people.” In Russia and Central Asia, a network of YouTubers was secretly paid to create videos promoting “democratic values”; “project communications” were carefully concealed to ensure the network’s existence, and London’s role in managing it was kept “confidential.”
Meanwhile, in the Baltic states, online personalities received unadvertised “personal brand strategy informed by individual target audience analysis, growth strategies for their chosen social media platform, and digital marketing and campaign training.”
Quite clearly, far from fostering independent citizen journalism, these initiatives were pure astroturfing, the creation of a hand-picked clandestine nexus of effective British agents helped by OIP to generate slick propaganda — reading scripts effectively prepared by the Foreign Office — which was then amplified globally by the organization’s network members. There are obvious echoes in this of the U.S. National Security Council giving direct briefings to Tik Tok stars on Washington’s “strategic goals” in the Ukraine conflict.
So in other words: Jankowicz and other national security goons’ talk about “best practices” is effectively about best practices of manufacturing consent for the parasitic 1%, for the US empire.
As a taste of the censorship regime that would or will follow under Jankowicz lead, behold how she already blocked actual journalists who do not parrot US mainstream media propaganda:
Her liberal cult and bubble-centric reasoning for this step, together with some comments that regard her actions as “defamatory”:
Jankowicz is so insane that she even blocked critical journalists preemptively:
This strange behavior of hers can partially be explained by Jankowicz’s virtue signalling and posing as a champion of women’s online rights: From her liberal cultist perspective, she ‘just’ blocked some of world’s most relevant actual journalists (who rather irrelevantly happen to be male) before she would be subjected to “abuse and harrassment” by them. She was ‘just’ “fighting back” — like Don Quijote against windmills:
This essentially means that Jankowicz is yet another so-called “intersectional imperialist” who uses, in this case, her womanhood to whitewash the classic imperialist policies of a) censorship or of b) smearing the victims of empire and those who are opposed to empire and its for the 99% detrimental consequences:
Jankowicz also committed two other sickening Orwellian reversals by claiming that 1) “liberal minority”(!) voices are 2) “being silenced on social media.” These are patent falsehoods and likely lies since it is actually liberals who constitute the establishment and since it is actually liberal closet authoritarian establishment figures like Jankowicz that silenced or will silence others on the left and right on social media — as well as any critic of the US empire:
The following is an interesting sidenote on intentional humiliation by authority figures such as Jankowicz:
As some viewers have noticed, Jankowicz facial body language in the above video is also very much off, including in terms of blinking her eyes overly frequently:
A possible to highly likely explanation for that is the positive correlation between lying and blinking:
As a further testament to how insane and dangerous Jankowicz and liberal authoritarians like her are, you here have her suggesting that Politburo “verfied” Orwellian goodthink figures like her receive special edit powers on Twitter to “add context to certain tweets”:
But the not just dangerous but furthermore plainly idiotic thing about Jankowicz suggestion is that the option to “add context” already exists in the form of the possibility of replying to tweets:
The entire idea of such a US Ministry of Truth and it being headed by the insane US national security goon Jankowicz was and is so obviously wrong and was met with so much resistance that it was at least momentarily “paused” on May 18.
In a highly predictable move that further confirms her cognitive/epistemic or moral insanity, the professional disinformer and national security goon Jankowicz blames ‘disinformation’ for that preliminary outcome that puts a dent into her career and claims, Herman Göring-style and like a good liberal establishment Nazi (see part 12, section 14.2, for the manipulative means of guilt-tripping), that this will endanger ‘national security’ — i.e. the security of the parasitic 1% in their rule over the 99% (“USG” stands for United States Government):
Mainstream media such as the WaPo which are in bed with both the US national security state and the US oligarchs (in that case mainly the WaPo owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) provided for further propagandistic cover and twisting of the truth. From the earlier May 20, 2022, MintpressNews article by Kit Klarenberg:
The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s highly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board,” launched with much fanfare just three weeks earlier, was to close, and that its director, Nina Jankowicz — former fellow at the quasi-state Wilson Center think tank, and Ukrainian foreign ministry communications adviser — had resigned.
The exclusive report, authored by Taylor Lorenz, went to enormous efforts to frame the Board’s dissolution as resulting from egregious sabotage by right-wing activists, who engaged in “coordinated online attacks” on its “well-known,” “well-regarded” chief, subjecting her to an “unrelenting barrage of harassment,” which served to “derail” the Biden administration’s benevolent efforts to tackle the “urgent and important issue” of disinformation.
In reality, public backlash against the Board, which erupted immediately following its official launch on April 27, was wide-ranging, and anything but partisan or personal. Prominent rights groups and lawmakers expressed grave concerns about its constitutionality and the obvious risk of its serving as a state censorship mechanism, with many comparisons drawn to the infamous Ministry of Truth conjured by George Orwell in “1984.”
Many legitimate, vital criticisms of Jankowicz were also raised, including her history of slandering independent news outlets, such as The Grayzone, as “Russian disinformation”; frenzied attacks on WikiLeaks and its imprisoned founder, Julian Assange; and enthusiastic advocacy on behalf of former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, author of the utterly discredited “Trump-Russia” dossier that produced countless wholly fictitious stories in the mainstream media, many of which have since been significantly rowed back or retracted outright.
While in Kiev, Jankowicz hosted the YouTube channel of U.K. and U.S. government-funded “fact checker” StopFake, which has endlessly whitewashed the issue of widespread fascism in Ukraine. Jankowicz herself is directly implicated in this shameful, misleading output. In January 2017, she presented an on-camera report extolling the virtues of four national paramilitary units, including the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, linked to serious human rights abuses and brutal war crimes.
Lorenz’s friendship with Jankowicz notwithstanding, it’s rather extraordinary that one of America’s leading newspapers — which in 2017 adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness,” inspired by famous quotes in defense of the First Amendment, and condemning official secrecy — is lamenting the demise of a shadowy government unit concerned with determining what constitutes “fake news,” let alone was so enthusiastically supportive of such an entity’s existence in the first place.
Overall though and independently of the future of their officially and supposedly “paused” Ministry of Truth, US empire and national security state attempts to censor and manufacture truth will “continue” unabated:
And no, this is not a crazy conspiracy theory, as some deeply progagandized sheeple might ‘think,’ but comes straight from the horse’s mouth:
The work will also continue outside of the failed Minstry of Truth:
Conclusion
So much for an overview of political and state censorship — including via imprisonment and murder, (neo-)McCarthyism, financial censorship and Orwellian Ministries of Truth — and for insights into the epistemologically or morally insane minds of the professional bullshitters, censorers, disinformers, liars, propagandists and manufacturers of consent who propose and do such things. For a discussion of censorship from the other sources of manufacturing consent, see the following parts 13b and 13c.
