The report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business stated:

“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech.”

The government’s actions fueled “a censorship ecosystem” that suppressed “individuals’ First Amendment rights” and “the ability of certain small businesses to compete online.”

The report focused on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which promoted and funded “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space … with domestic censorship capabilities.”

The “fact-checking” firms named in the report include the International Fact-Checking Network — owned by the Poynter Institute — and NewsGuard.

The International Fact-Checking Network, established in 2015, has received funding from another State Department-affiliated group, the National Endowment for Democracy — and from Google, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

According to the House report, the federal government “assisted the private sector in detecting alleged MDM [misinformation-disinformation-malinformation] for moderation” and “worked with foreign governments with strict internet speech laws,” including European Union member states and the United Kingdom, to censor speech.

The report determined that the GEC and the National Endowment for Democracy violated international restrictions by “collaborating with fact-checking entities” to assess the content of domestic media outlets.

The “fact-checking” operations targeted independent media outlets, and as a result, “the scales are tipped in favor of outlets which express certain partisan narratives rather than holding the government accountable.”

Whether the State Department’s actions rise to “unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment is currently before the courts,” the report stated.

The State Department and several GEC officials are defendants in Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit alleging the Biden administration colluded with social media to censor free speech.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and its chairman on leave, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden, a similar lawsuit that last year was consolidated with Murthy v. Missouri.

The Poynter Institute is a defendant in another censorship lawsuit, CHD v. Meta, that CHD filed against Facebook’s parent company.

NewsGuard partnered with CDC, WHO to censor online content

According to the report, NewsGuard used money it received from the GEC and the U.S. Department of Defense to fund efforts to lower the advertising revenue “of businesses purported to spread MDM.”

“A system that rates the credibility of press is fatally flawed as it is subject to the partisan lens of the assessor, making the ratings unreliable,” the report states.

NewsGuard leveraged taxpayer dollars to develop Misinformation Fingerprints, a product that “catalogues what it determines to be the most prominent falsehoods and ‘misinformation narratives’” circulating online, “essentially outsourcing the U.S. government’s perception of fact to NewsGuard,” the report states.

NewsGuard later partnered with dozens of companies, organizations, universities and media outlets, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of the Surgeon General and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“During the pandemic, the WHO enlisted NewsGuard for its input, including regular reports, on which COVID-19 narratives it determined to be misinformation were prevalent online,” the report states. “The WHO then contacted social media companies and search engines asking them to remove this content.”

‘Nobody wanted’ fact-checkers until ‘actual truths started getting out’

Tim Hinchliffe, publisher of The Sociable, told The Defender, “These so-called ‘fact-checkers’ are not in the business of actually checking facts. They are in the business of controlling narratives … Nobody wanted or needed these organizations until actual truths started getting out.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and former U.S. assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told The Defender the government increasingly relies on censorship to promote its favored narratives.

“They need to institute more and more censorship,” Fitts said. “It’s hard to refute the gaslighting that flows from this imagination factory.”

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised that the State Department is “working to censor those who disagree with U.S. government policies and their globalist agenda.”

The report recommends that no federal funds “should be used to grow companies whose operations are designed to demonetize and interfere with the domestic press” and that federal agencies “should not be outsourcing their perception of fact to speech-police organizations subject to partisan bias.”

GEC also faces the loss of its government funding. According to the Washington Examiner, “A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, aims to ban future checks to the GEC.”

But for Boyle, this is not enough. He said the State Department has, “at a minimum,” committed “the federal crime of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.”

Censorship ‘a pendulum that swings both ways’

The Gateway Pundit last week reported on additional links between the International Fact-Checking Network, other “fact-checking” firms and Big Tech.

In 2015, Poynter partnered with Google News Lab, which earlier that year, helped establish First Draft News. Active until 2022, First Draft was a consortium of social media verification groups that shared methods for combating “fake news.”

Another First Draft founder, fact-checking firm Bellingcat, also received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy.

First Draft was previously led by Claire Wardle, Ph.D., a Brown University professor who, according to “Twitter Files” released last year, advised the Biden administration on COVID-19 “misinformation” — despite having no science or medical credentials.

In 2016, Poynter and the International Fact-Checking Network partnered with First Draft “to tackle common issues, including ways to streamline the [news] verification process.” Other partners included Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, NBC News and BBC News.

In 2017, Google News Lab partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network “to dramatically increase the searchable output of fact-checkers worldwide, expand fact-checking to new markets and support fact-checking beyond politics, such as in sports, health and science.” The following year, Poynter acquired PolitiFact.com.

Google was also one of the original funders of The Trust Project, a consortium of news organizations that developed eight “trust indicators” to help the public “easily assess the integrity of news.”

These “trust indicators” later became “one of the sources being used by NewsGuard Technologies for a new product to improve news literacy,” and formed “a foundation for NewsGuard review development.”

Hinchliffe warned that the beneficiaries of censorship based on today’s “fact-checking” may become its targets in the future.

“One of the problems of censorship that operates under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, apart from stifling free speech and suppressing actual truths, is that it’s a pendulum that swings both ways,” he said. “The people calling for censorship now may be in a greater position of power to do so, but it will one day swing back at them.”

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. Mr. Kennedy, an independent candidate for president of the U.S., is on leave from CHD. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy or his support for President Donald Trump’s campaign.

While Clinton acknowledged the importance of indicting foreign actors, namely Russians, directly responsible for meddling in US elections, she argued that Americans who play a role in amplifying “disinformation” should not be overlooked.

Now he’s participating in a Congressional investigation.

In a stunning Monday evening letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg admitted that senior Biden administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook teams to suppress information related to COVID-19 that the platform would not have otherwise censored – and the administration ‘expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.’

Zuck now says that Facebook should not have compromised its standards “due to pressure from any Administration in either direction.”

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” reads the letter. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”

He’s also committed and “ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Mark Zuckerberg just admitted three things:

1. Biden-Harris Admin "pressured" Facebook to censor Americans.

2. Facebook censored Americans.

3. Facebook throttled the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Big win for free speech. pic.twitter.com/ALlbZd9l6K

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) August 26, 2024

Zuckerberg also said that Facebook shouldn’t have censored the NY Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story – and said that the FBI had warned the platform “about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election.”

“That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply,” reads the letter. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story.”

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg admitting to all of this on Joe Rogan, 2 years ago. pic.twitter.com/vR5i8dHgTP

— ZNO (@therealZNO) August 26, 2024

He also points out in the letter that “some people believe this work benefited one party over the other.”

According to Zuck, Facebook “no longer temporarily demotes things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers.”

Speaking of demoting stories, Facebook began censoring ZeroHedge in 2019 – with links to our articles met with a popup that said “the link you tried to visit goes against our community standards.”

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that states and individual plaintiffs who challenged the Biden administration’s censorship complex don’t have standing to sue because they cannot establish a clear link between the government’s pressure and the platform’s actions.

What will Jim Jordan do with this information?

Now imagine if we had a real Speaker of the House and a GOP with a spine so that we would do something about this.

— Gunther Eagleman (@GuntherEagleman) August 26, 2024

hey "antifa", you REALLY should google what "fa" actually means… https://t.co/rcRxkwxjh8

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 27, 2024

In America, the Supreme Court essentially gave such First Amendment-trashing operations a pass, in the recent Murthy lawsuit, by claiming that states and individuals weren’t being injured by the instructions from the Joe Biden administration to social media companies on what ideas to suppress.

That ruling, killing the case because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing,” allows Biden administration officials to continue to give censorship instructions to social media, to even coerce and threaten them, so they shut down ideas Biden dislikes.

But that’s minor next to what’s going on in Europe, the report explained. There, there’s a new censorship “superweapon” in place. Ready to use.

The foundation report cited Europe’s new Digital Services Act, which creates a “unified framework for government-directed content moderation across the European Union.”

Each country now has a “digital services coordinator” with the power to penalize online platforms if they fail to adequately address “systemic risks,” the report pointed out.

Included is “hate speech” and “misinformation,” which is known to include speech that is correct and reasonable, but just conflicts with the politically correct talking points. Comments, for example, about there existing in science two sexes, male and female, has been condemned as both hate speech and misinformation.

“These official speech commissars can deputize third party entities to act as ‘trusted flaggers,’ empowering the global network of NGOs, research institutes, and private companies that make up the censorship industry,” the report said.

The act actually went into effect at the beginning of the year, and is “the European Union’s flagship online censorship law,” the foundation said.

“Other than China’s Great Firewall, it is arguably the most elaborate and wide-reaching instrument of government control of online content in the world.”

It categorizes its targeted communities as Very Large Online Platforms and Very Large Online Search Engines, and can be used to impose fines “for non-compliance” of up to 6% of a providers’ global annual turnover.

Those corporations, under the law, are required to “identify, analyze, and assess systemic risks” and then install procedures to oppose those “risks.”

“In other words, the EU wants platforms to identify and suppress content proactively — something that, realistically, can only be accomplished at scale using AI censorship tools,” the foundation reported.

Included in its vast overreach is information dealing with “public security and electoral processes,” “gender-based violence,” “discrimination” or “illegal content.”

Also “hate speech,” which, the foundation confirms, “has been used as a pretext to criminally penalize political candidates and members of the public for political expression in a number of European countries.”

Also, the law boosts the censorship industry by requiring for “vetted researchers” to have access to the data from platforms, opening the door for more censorship.

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Last year on Independence Day, U.S. District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty issued the initial injunction blocking a range of government agencies from communicating with social media companies to suppress speech, calling the government’s actions “Orwellian.” But one year later, with the Fifth Circuit’s narrower injunction now lifted by the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, officials have free rein to again employ the same tactics.

“It’s basically a roadmap for government actors, not just the federal government, but also state and local government actors, to reach out to social media companies and pressure them into censoring this disfavored speech,” Center for American Liberty associate counsel Eric Sell told the DCNF.

The Supreme Court held that plaintiffs in the case, who included two states and five individuals, did not have standing to seek an injunction against the government.

In her majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the plaintiffs failed “to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications with the platforms.” She also noted that platforms had “independent incentives to moderate content,” making it difficult for the plaintiffs to establish they were harmed directly as a result of the government’s requests.

Justice Samuel Alito worried in his dissent that the Supreme Court’s ruling, though it did not reach the merits of the issue, would send the message that coercive government campaigns against certain speech can run unchecked if “carried out with enough sophistication.”

Alito wrote that the Court “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”

John Vecchione, senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents some plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri, told the DCNF that the majority’s decision gives government officials “wide running room” to put pressure on companies behind the scenes.

Agencies such as the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) already resumed communications with social media platforms after multiple justices appeared sympathetic to the government’s position during oral arguments in March, reports indicated at the time.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement following the ruling that the Court’s decision “helps ensure the Biden Administration can continue our important work with technology companies to protect the safety and security of the American people.”

The #SCOTUS decision in Murthy v. Missouri undermines the #FirstAmendment in today's digital era by allowing government censorship without accountability.

This ruling completely disregards the Founding Fathers' belief that combating problematic speech should involve promoting… pic.twitter.com/tMeQoKsnBS

— New Civil Liberties Alliance (@NCLAlegal) July 3, 2024

“If courts require very strong evidence of causal links plus an ‘ongoing’ campaign just to get standing, government agencies can use that procedural requirement to escape judicial scrutiny of even very extensive indirect censorship,” George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote last week in Reason. “That problem is likely to become more severe as agencies figure out the relevant standing rules, and try to tailor their threatening communications to firms in ways that exploit them.”

Without an injunction, there’s nothing preventing the government from doing during the 2024 election what it did to encourage platforms to restrict content in 2020. As documents uncovered in the course of litigation revealed, officials demanded companies censor speech not only about COVID-19 but also the election.

During 2020, CISA engaged in “switchboarding” efforts, which allowed state and local election officials to flag “misinformation” posts for the agency, which it would in turn share with social media platforms.

State officials have also undertaken similar actions.

Sell represents a client, conservative political commentator Rogan O’Handley, who sued when his account was allegedly censored and later suspended by Twitter after California’s Office of Election Cybersecurity flagged it over a 2020-election related post. The Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up his case.

As the Murthy v. Missouri case returns to the district court, Vecchione said they will seek more evidence of government coercion through discovery.

“The Supreme Court has demanded a very high standard, and if the government is going to press on that standard, well, they’ve got to drop their shorts and show us everything,” Vecchione said.

Some plaintiffs suggested Congress step in after the ruling.

Health Freedom Louisiana co-director Jill Hines said Congress should “act immediately to defund agencies and third parties actively involved in this broadly pervasive and unconstitutional censorship scheme.” Stanford University School of Medicine professor Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya likewise said concrete action is needed to “restore free speech rights as a central plank of the American civic religion.”

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Chief Counsel Robert Corn-Revere made a similar call for Congress to “take action.”

“Despite reams of evidence documenting government pressure, the court held today these plaintiffs lacked standing to sue,” he said. “FIRE is concerned about what this means for future First Amendment plaintiffs. But the majority opinion notes courts have the power to stop government attempts to pressure social media platforms when proven. That’s important.”

NCLA Chief Executive Officer Philip Hamburger wrote in a column Tuesday that the decision made the First Amendment “for all practical purposes, unenforceable against large scale government censorship.”

“The decision is a strong contender to be the worst speech decision in the court’s history,” he said.

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Samantha Vinograd, until recently of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), also asserted that these days, because of what she considers to be election disinformation, “there is an unprecedented level of physical threats” while the US information ecosystem is “incredibly vulnerable.”

Dramatic and alarmist statements like this may be necessary to justify the rest of Vinograd’s message, which in effect attacks free speech, as it is legally protected in the US.

Appearing on CBS, Vinograd – who was until last December Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention – warned that the First Amendment might protect free speech, but that engaging in free speech is apparently not “cost-free.”

The Face the Nation hosts framed the problem as, essentially, federal laws (the Constitution) protecting speech, but the damage being done at the state level – and then what states, who organize elections, can do to fix that “problem.”

Spreading lies about candidates, as they put it, was given as an example of legal, protected speech becoming an issue by having the ability to create “a threat at the state level” – and asked Vinograd who she thought was supposed to correct the situation.

Vinograd – who has been bouncing between various administrations (including those of Bush and Obama, and private companies like Goldman Sachs and Stripe before landing at Biden’s DHS) – seemed to suggest that Big Tech (i.e., social media companies) should be assisting the government.

The federal government said Vinograd, “should not be the omnipresent fact checker for the American people.”

And even though, according to her, the government is debunking information about elections that is deemed to be inaccurate, social media companies “should be thinking about what kinds of election disinformation violate their terms of service.”

It’s difficult not to take this as a not-so-veiled added pressure on social platforms to not only continue with censoring content but perhaps expand it in terms of what qualifies as election disinformation.

Either way, Vinograd is in favor of enlisting “every American” to help out as well (although it is not clear in what specific way), invoking even the concept of patriotic duty.

And Vinograd did not miss the opportunity to assert that election misinformation threats are now of such magnitude as to present a national security issue.

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, join Reclaim The Net.

Search algorithms often show results for more likely queries based on mispellings; a search for “Patrick Mahones” will yield results for “Patrick Mahomes,” for example. But considering there is no “Harrison Butler” of note and sales of Harrison Butker’s merchandise has been extremely popular, we can safely assume Amazon is playing the woke game of “Hide the Christian Kicker”.

There is a “Butler Harrison” who authored a children’s book last year. There is an author named “Keith A. Butler” who pops up third and fourth on the search. But as far as Amazon is concerned, Harrison Butker doesn’t exist and if he did, they don’t want you to find his popular merchandise. One has to tell Amazon to search for “harrison butker” instead of the non-existent “harrison butler” because apparently the retail giant is big mad at the kicker.

Leftists have been breathlessly condemning Butker ever since video of him expressing traditional Christian values started making its rounds.

The NFL just condemned this speech by Super Bowl champion Harrison Butker.

They 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 don't want people to hear it.

It would be a shame if you make it viral. pic.twitter.com/gKy7wJsqpu

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 16, 2024

Not all leftists are as upset about his opinions. Talk show host Bill Maher went on a mini-tirade towards those who share his ideology who are demonizing Butker. During a Friday night panel discussion, Maher mocked Butker’s critics for trying to make him out to be “history’s greatest monster.”

“I can’t express how much this guy is not like me,” said Maher. “He’s religious. He loves marriage. He loves kids… And he’s now history’s greatest monster.”

“Again, I don’t agree with much with this guy, but I don’t get the thing. He said… ‘Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world.’ Ok, that seems fairly, like, modern. ‘But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.’ I don’t see what the big crime is. I really don’t,” Maher continued.

“And I think this is part of the problem people have with the left is that lots of people in this country are like this. Like he’s saying some of you may go on to lead successful careers, but a lot of you are excited about this other way that people- everybody used to be. And now can’t that be a choice too?”

“And I feel like they feel very put upon, like there’s only one way to be a good person and that’s to get an advanced degree from one of those a– h–e factories like Harvard,” Maher continued.

The “tolerant” left demands their ideas be heard and amplified while any opposing thoughts are supposed to be anathema. It just goes to show that if you can’t make a good argument, quashing righteous thoughts is the only plausible recourse.

(Mercola)—In a February 16, 2024, interview, Tucker Carlson and Mike Benz, founder and executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), discussed the erosion of free speech.

Fundamental Right to Free Speech Is at Risk

As noted by Carlson, freedom of speech, as outlined in the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, is being eroded — not based on the truthfulness of information, but on whether it aligns with the agendas and narratives of those in power.

This right, which has been central to the identity and exceptionalism of the United States since its inception, ensures that people can express their thoughts and beliefs without fear of censorship or persecution. This right is what distinguishes us as free individuals, opposed to slaves. And, as noted by Carlson, there’s no hate speech exception in the First Amendment.

“… just because you hate what somebody else thinks you cannot force that person to be quiet,” Carlson says.

Carlson also points out that while censorship itself is nothing new, the censorship we face today is very different from other historical instances. It’s a far more nuanced, multifaceted approach that includes societal, technological and political dimensions. Moreover, this new form of censorship is being subtly integrated into the very fabric of our daily lives, which makes it all the more insidious and difficult to combat.

The phenomenon of labeling undesirable yet truthful information as “malinformation” is but one example of this. This labeling process, devoid of concern for the factual accuracy or the honesty of the expressed views, undermines the essence of free speech by restricting open discourse based on subjective criteria rather than objective truth.

Importantly, the mechanisms enforcing this modern censorship are not confined to private sectors or individual platforms but are significantly directed and influenced by the U.S. government itself. This intertwining of state powers with censorship activities marks a troubling departure from traditional American values, where free speech has been held sacred.

While many intuitively perceive this shift, Carlson suspects they may not fully grasp the mechanics of this censorship, or just how deeply embedded it has become in the societal and political landscape. This lack of understanding further compounds the risk, as combating an unseen or poorly comprehended threat is far more challenging.

Modern Censorship Mechanics Explained

According to Benz, modern censorship is based on a complex, integrated system where governmental interests, military defense strategies and corporate technologies converge to regulate and restrict free speech, moving us away from the foundational ideals of internet freedom and openness toward a more controlled and surveilled communication landscape.

In the interview, he outlines the transformation from internet freedom to internet censorship, and how these changes have been influenced and directed by various government agencies and the military-industrial complex.

Initially, the internet was heralded as a tool of freedom, promoting open dialogue and the exchange of ideas across borders. This freedom was supported and even exploited by entities like the Pentagon, the State Department and intelligence services to advance U.S. interests abroad, particularly in facilitating regime change by supporting dissident groups in authoritarian countries. However, this perspective has shifted dramatically in the past decades.

According to Benz, the change began with the realization within U.S. and allied defense and intelligence communities that the same tools that promote freedom and regime change abroad could also be used against them, which led to a significant shift from promoting to restricting speech online.

“The high-water mark of internet free speech was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012, when you had … all of the adversary governments of the Obama administration — Egypt, Tunisia — all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions, and you had the state department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods,” Benz says.

“So free speech was an instrument of statecraft from the national security state to begin with. All of that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom.

In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup, where Crimea and the Donbass broke away and they broke away with, essentially, a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for … That was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet.

In the eyes of NATO, as they saw it, the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment … You don’t need to win miliary skirmishes to take over Central and Eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem, because that’s what controls elections.”

Censorship Is Now Embedded Into the Internet Infrastructure

The mechanics of modern censorship, as described by Benz, involve a coordinated effort between governmental bodies, the defense industry and tech companies to develop and implement sophisticated methods to monitor, control, and suppress speech online under the guise of combating “disinformation” and “malinformation” for national security purposes.

Censorship mechanisms are now embedded within the infrastructure of the internet, from social media platforms to search engines, and tools initially developed to protect democracy and promote free speech have all been repurposed to monitor and control the flow of information instead.

But, again, these efforts are not necessarily concerned with the veracity of the information but rather with its alignment with, or opposition to, certain political agendas, both national and global.

These censorship mechanisms are now embedded within the very infrastructure of the internet itself, from social media platforms to search engines, and tools initially developed to protect democracy and promote free speech, such as VPNs, Tor, encryption and private browsing modes, have all been repurposed to monitor and control the flow of information instead.

The involvement of major tech corporations — initially funded and supported by government grants and contracts — plays a crucial role in this transformation. For example, Google began as a project funded by a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant, awarded to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford.

This funding was part of a joint CIA-NSA program aimed at understanding how groups form and interact online, essentially tracking “birds of a feather” through search engine data aggregation. That technology is now being used to identify, monitor and silence “dissident” voices within the U.S., no matter how righteous their views may be.

Legal Frameworks Now Sustains Modern Censorship

Benz also reviews the legal and institutional frameworks established to sustain this modern censorship, which allows for a seamless transition between state objectives and private sector compliance.

This public-private interaction is a clear departure from the overt government censorship of old. What we now have is a far more nuanced, shadowy form of content control that blurs the lines between public and private actions against free speech.

As we saw during the COVID pandemic, this also allowed government to plead innocence and pretend that the decision to censor some content was done by the companies themselves.

However, between the Twitter Files, the CTIL files and the lawsuit against the Biden administration, we now have ample evidence showing that companies were pressured to comply with the government’s demand for censorship. They didn’t come up with that on their own.

According to Benz, it’s quite clear that state-sponsored initiatives, supported by defense and intelligence agencies, are shaping online narratives and controlling information flow in the U.S. under the pretense that national security is at stake. As such, these initiatives have led to a form of legalized censorship.

U.S.-led initiatives have also influenced internet governance and free speech regulations internationally. For example, the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is a significant legislative move towards formalizing and legalizing online censorship.

The DSA, which took effect February 17, 2024, requires tech companies to comply with stringent content moderation policies to operate within the EU market. This act represents a legal framework that extends well beyond traditional boundaries of censorship.

It pushes companies to police content in accordance with European standards, which is basically just a proxy for NATO and U.S. foreign policy objectives. Collectively, these frameworks mark a global shift towards institutionalizing online censorship through legal and regulatory measures. As noted by Benz, “What I’m describing is military rule. It’s the inversion of democracy.”

Building a Whole-of-Society Solution

As explained by Benz, the censorship industry was built as a whole-of-society effort, and to combat that, we need a whole-of-society solution.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, misinformation online is a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society solution. By that, they mean that four types of institutions must fuse together as a seamless whole. Those four categories and key functions are:

1. Government institutions, which provide funding and coordination.
2. Private sector institutions that do the censorship and dedicate funds to censorship through corporate-social responsibility programs.
3. Civil society institutions (universities, NGOs, academia, foundations, nonprofits and activists) that do the research, the spying and collecting of data that are then given to the private sector to censor.
4. News media/fact checking institutions, which put pressure on institutions, platforms and businesses to comply with the censorship demands.

Benz’ organization, FFO, educates people about this structure, and the ways in which legislatures and the government can be restructured, how civil society institutions can be established, and how news media can be created to support and promote freedom rather than censorship.

To learn how you can be part of the solution, check out foundationforfreedomonline.com. You can also follow Benz on Twitter.

I firmly believe that we can turn this situation around, if for no other reason than the fact that there are some eight billion of us who want freedom, while those who seek to enslave us number in the thousands, or tens of thousands at the most. Either way, they’re clearly outnumbered.

But we need to spread the word, and help our friends and family understand how important our decisions are. We either support the network that seeks to take our freedom, or the network that seeks to protect it. Educate yourself about what’s at stake, then trust yourself to make the right decisions.

And one of those battling those programs, illustrated by the FBI’s interference in the 2020 election when it told media corporations to suppress information about Biden family scandals documented in a computer abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop, is the Rutherford Institute.

“Technofascism is the modern-day equivalent of book burning, which does away with controversial ideas and the people who espouse them,” explained constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of “Battlefield America: The War on the American People.”

He said, “As the Supreme Court itself recognized, ‘The people lose when the government is the one deciding which ideas should prevail.’ Once you allow government agencies and corporations to determine what viewpoints are ‘legitimate’ and which are not, you’re already moving fast down a slippery slope that ends with the censorship of all viewpoints altogether other than that of the government and its corporate allies.”

The organization has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court in the case Murthy v. Missouri.

The case isn’t complicated. It charges the federal government with violating the free speech rights under the First Amendment by “coercing and significantly encouraging social media companies to silence any viewpoints at odds with the government.”

Those include views on COVID, fraud in the 2020 election and more.

The organization explained, “For years now, federal officials from the White House, the Surgeon General’s Office, CDC, FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been in regular contact with nearly every major American social media company about the spread of ‘misinformation’ on their platforms, urging them to remove disfavored content and accounts…”

In response those corporations, often run by extremely wealthy leftists, “gave government officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users.”

Those corporations also reported to their government handlers.

The result was a First Amendment lawsuit where the judge first hearing the complaint called the government’s scheming “Orwellian” and akin to that writer’s “Ministry of Truth,” which in fact promoted lies.

“It was government officials who were pulling the strings through private communications and threats,” Rutherford said. “Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include two epidemiologists who criticized COVID-19 lockdowns; a psychiatrist who opposed lockdowns and vaccine mandates; the owner of Gateway Pundit, a once-deplatformed news site; and the states of Missouri and Louisiana, whose attorneys general asserted their interests in protecting their citizens and the free flow of information

“In siding with the plaintiffs, both the trial court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that government officials ‘engaged in a broad pressure campaign’ by ‘relentlessly’ asking the platforms to remove disfavored content (including ‘anti-vaccine’ content which did not contain actionable misinformation), making ‘uncompromising demands’ to moderate content, and threatening to retaliate against inaction with the prospect of legal reforms and enforcement actions”

The case now is pending at the U.S. Supreme Court, where government officials are claiming they have the right to censor opinions that are expressed in America. if they in fact disagree with the Biden admniistration.

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(Mercola)—C.J. Hopkins, an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin, speaks openly about the pathologized totalitarianism that is subtly taking over society. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he criticized lockdowns and COVID-19 shot mandates, as well as the censorship of dissenters.

During the early phases of the pandemic, Hopkins’ work was heavily censored by YouTube and Facebook, which went so far as to even suspend or restrict the accounts of people who tried to share Hopkins’ posts.¹ Now, he’s facing another challenge to freedom and autonomy, as he’s facing criminal charges for a satirical tweet.

German Government Prosecutes Hopkins Over Tweets

The Berlin State Prosecutor’s office is pursuing criminal charges against Hopkins for “disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”² The propaganda referenced is two tweets from 2022, which include an image with a mask carrying a faint image of a swastika. Writing in The Atlantic, journalist James Kirchick notes:³

“To argue that Hopkins was advancing National Socialism by imposing a swastika over a face mask is absurd. He was clearly doing the opposite: invoking a symbol of what is widely regarded as the most evil and destructive ideology in human history to express his feelings — however histrionic — for state-promulgated public-health policies he dislikes.

Hopkins was ‘comparing the evolution of one system which I think is totalitarian in nature to the evolution of another totalitarian system that we all know,’ he told me, not glorifying fascism.”

But in Germany, national laws prohibit Nazi insignia, which is why Amazon banned the sale of Hopkins’ book, “The Rise of the New Normal Reich,” which also features the swastika-emblazoned mask, in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If Hopkins is found guilty, he could be fined about $4,000 or sent to jail for 60 days. Kirchick writes:⁴

“Hopkins sees his ordeal as part of a broader ‘criminalization of dissent’ sweeping the Western world. ‘Basically anyone prominent, halfway prominent, and even little fish like me, if you get on the radar of challenging the official ideology, the program of the day, they’re making examples of people is basically what it is,’ he told me.

Against his lawyer’s advice, Hopkins republished the tweets in his Substack newsletter — sparking, as he reported, a second criminal investigation, this time for minimizing Nazi crimes.”

Are Authoritarian Measures Accelerating in Germany?

In “The Rise of the New Normal Reich,” Hopkins details how measures of totalitarian control are being normalized around the world. Depending on where you live, you may or may not be experiencing these things firsthand.

“If you’re aware of how people are behaving in different countries or in different states in the U.S., what have you, there are many places where it is becoming just completely normal to walk around with a medical-looking mask on, and people don’t think twice about segregating and banning people and imposing vaccine mandates and what have you.

All of these measures that were rolled out during the shock and awe phase are just subtly becoming a part of daily life,” he explained during our 2022 interview.⁵

“We’re being conditioned to walk around in our lives, terrified of some pathogen that is going to come and attack us, or some health threat. It’s really, it’s a wholesale revision of reality, and it’s frightening.”⁶ At the heart of his argument is that the global-capitalist ruling establishment, which Hopkins refers to as GloboCap, is using fear as a strategy for control over the population.

In Germany, Hopkins says fascist measures have been quickly accelerating. “Seriously, assuming you don’t live here, you likely have no idea how fascistic German society and culture has become,” he wrote in November 2023, “and how quickly the transformation has occurred. It began in the Spring of 2020 with the introduction of the ‘Corona measures,’ and has been intensifying ever since.”⁷

“The shock and awe phase that we went through in ’20 and ’21 is over,” Hopkins said in our interview. “You can’t sustain shock and awe like that forever. What we’re experiencing now is really the normalization of the pathologization of society.”⁸ Even the charges against Hopkins seem baseless, as, even in Germany, Nazi imagery is allowed for certain purposes, including countering anti-constitutional activities. Kirchick continues:⁹

“So far, although he retains U.S. citizenship, Hopkins’s case has attracted little attention in the American media. But his predicament offers an important opportunity to examine how we think about the most loaded political symbols — and to cherish the exceptional free-speech culture ensured by America’s First Amendment.

On its face, the charge against Hopkins seems specious. Although the display of Nazi imagery is generally prohibited in Germany, the country’s criminal code allows the display of such symbols for ‘civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, the coverage of historic and current events, or similar purposes.'”

The Goal Is to Silence Dissenters and Control Society

In the past, totalitarian regimes used drastic and obvious shows of control, putting people into concentration camps. Today’s ruling establishment is far more subtle in its tactics, but possibly even more dangerous. Hopkins says:¹⁰

“I don’t think they can put us in camps … they don’t have to. If you look at what’s happening to the economy, if you look at what’s happening to our ability to travel, to our ability to communicate, I mean, the censorship that is going on, I think the technologies that are being deployed in the service of this new form of totalitarianism are much more subtle and, in many ways, much more effective.

I’ve made the point, online, I made the point in the book again, I don’t think global capitalism can go openly totalitarianism in the same way that systems in the 20th century did. I think it’s suicidal for global capitalism. It needs to maintain the simulation of freedom, the simulation of democracy, and so the technologies that are being deployed are much more subtle.”

While people may not end up in prison-like camps, the end-game may be no less restrictive. Technologies like the upcoming central bank digital currency (CBDC), for instance, could easily lead to tight control over your finances, limiting your ability to purchase food or pay rent if your access to your funds is turned off. In the case of Germany prosecuting Hopkins, he says:¹¹

“Basically, the government no longer needs to justify its crackdown on dissidents with plausible legal (or even just rational) arguments.

They know that the majority of the German public supports the ‘New Normal’ Gleichschaltung campaign, or at least will look the other way as they carry out police raids on the homes and offices of ‘Islamic influencers,’ ban demonstrations (exactly as they did in 2020), censor and criminalize dissent, imprison political dissidents based on blatantly false criminal charges, and otherwise make a mockery of the German constitution.”

In explaining why he republished the swastika-mask images again, knowing it would likely lead to additional charges against him, Hopkins wrote:¹²

“No, I am not a glutton for punishment. I’m not at all enjoying my introduction to the so-called ‘German legal system.’ … The goal of … prosecutions like mine (and those of many other dissidents currently) is (a) to punish us for speaking out against ‘New Normal’ totalitarianism by making our lives as miserable as possible, (b) to make examples of us to discourage others from speaking out, and (c) to intimidate us into shutting … up.

Totalitarians, fascists, and other power freaks are essentially just glorified schoolyard bullies. They may cloak themselves in the mantle of the law, but their modus operandi is brute force … their message is simple: ‘either do what we say, or we will hurt you.’ … The point is, never give in to a bully. Never reify a bully’s ‘authority.’ If you do, you will find yourself sucked into the bully’s sadistic, nihilistic ‘reality.’

You will be playing by the bully’s rules. And that is all ‘reality’ actually is, a set of rules we agree to play by, or, in this case, do not agree to play by.

So, getting back to my criminal case, and the Berlin State Prosecutor’s latest attempt to bully me into shutting up and demonstrating my ‘respect’ for the ‘authority’ and ‘power’ of the Berlin State Prosecutor … I do not respond well to threats. I do not take orders from totalitarians and fascists, or any other type of authoritarians or bullies.

So that is why I have republished those Tweets, and why I will continue to republish those Tweets every time the German authorities threaten me with additional criminal charges for refusing to obey their ‘authority.'”

Dissent Is Essential in a Free Society

When citizens are punished for criticizing government policies, we should all worry that totalitarianism is near. Using clever tactics like censorship and attacks on people’s reputations and credibility, those in control are moving toward taking away something that’s essential in a free society — dissent. Kirchick explains why, regardless of how you feel about Hopkins’ message, his prosecution should trouble us all:¹³

“Some might argue that, as a permanent resident of Germany, Hopkins ought to have known what he was getting into by conjuring the country’s ultimate taboo, and that his posturing as a sort of latter-day Martin Niemöller, the anti-Nazi theologian, would not endear him to his hosts.

‘Of course; it’s Germany,’ he said, when I put this to him. ‘Of course they’re hyper about anything that is promoting the Nazis and, frankly, God bless them. That’s the way I feel about it; I’ve always supported it and understood it even though I’m a free-speech absolutist.’

One can call his method of argument likening anti-COVID policies to Nazism misguided, intellectually lazy, or tasteless — I personally find it to be all three — but endorsing ‘the aims’ of National Socialism it is not. Which strongly suggests that Hopkins is being punished not for promoting an outlawed political movement from the German past but for criticizing a government of the German present.

Such a conclusion is only reinforced by the second proceeding against Hopkins for the tweet ridiculing one particularly powerful member of that government, the country’s health minister.

That a citizen could be tried on these grounds in a Western democracy should trouble us, and Germany’s unique experience as the birthplace of Nazism offers no justification. On the contrary, precisely because that fraught history gives Germany ample reason for vigilance about support for fascism, it must be scrupulous in how it regulates expressions of said support.

According to the country’s criminal code, expression aimed at ‘countering anti-constitutional activities,’ as Hopkins’s swastika-branded mask clearly was, is protected. A government that prosecutes a writer for calling its policies fascistic unwittingly validates the criticism. Even if some find Hopkins’s views and the way he expresses them offensive, that does not lessen the danger that his prosecution represents.”

• ¹ TK News by Matt Taibbi May 13, 2021
• ² Substack, CJ Hopkins July 3, 2023
• ^{3, 4, 9, 13} The Atlantic January 3, 2024 (Archived)
• ^5, 6, 8 Dr. Mercola interviews C.J. Hopkins, interview transcript, page 3
• ^7, 11 Substack, CJ Hopkins November 25, 2023
• ¹⁰ Dr. Mercola interviews C.J. Hopkins, interview transcript, pages 11, 12
• ¹² Substack, CJ Hopkins September 10, 2023