I put the word “precious” in quotes because social media accounts really are NOT precious at all. At least they shouldn’t be. And acknowledging that was the first step I needed to take in order to truly fight against the now-famous Censorship Industrial Complex.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger coined the phrase this week in front of Congress; you can watch his opening statement here. It’s a powerful and spot-on representation of what has been built in America today. The Censorship Industrial Complex is a phenomenon that continues to grow and is even being used against the “Twitter Files” testimonies that are currently attempting to expose it.

What everyone needs to understand is that it’s far bigger than just black-and-white censorship. The tactics used to quash non-compliant perspectives are numerous and diverse. As we’ve known for years regarding “shadowbanning,” one does not have to have their accounts officially banned in order to experience perverse censorship.

Then, there’s the counteroffensive against the truth that is used regularly by government and corporate media known as the “limited hangout.”

According to Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a limited hangout is “spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

We are seeing the limited hangout techniques currently being used against Tucker Carlson’s revelations about January 6. Instead of Uniparty Swamp members saying, “This information needs to be explored,” we’re seeing them lash out against Carlson and anyone echoing the unambiguous conclusions we should all be drawing about January 6. There are actually many conclusions we can draw and many more that we will be able to draw once the tapes are released to the public (Lord willing), but the overarching takeaway is that the January 6 Committee and those complicit in disseminating their narratives willfully lied to the American people to paint a distorted and obtuse picture of the “insurrection.”

As CJ Hopkins colorfully explained in his article, “The Censorship Industrial Complex,” we need “real” journalists to speak the truth about the important topics that are taboo. Unfortunately, just as the vast majority of doctors refused to expose what they knew in their hearts about the jabs out of fear of being ostracized from their lucrative profession, so too are “real” journalists unwilling to delve into the “fringe” even if they believe it to be true. After all, they could lose their coveted “Fox News Contributor” badge if they express wrongthink.

To get the “real” journalists to speak the truth, we need “fake” journalists (like me) and non-journalists (the people) to beat the drums of reality. When those drumbeats get loud enough and are hammered often enough, the “real” journalists will have the cover they need to disseminate what is being said.

We saw a perfect example of this with the January 6 tapes. Tucker Carlson would have never been able to expose the truth to the masses if “fake” journalists like Darren Beattie at Revolver News and Julie Kelly at American Greatness had not continuously asked questions and demanded answers for the last two years. They and an unfortunately small handful of other “fake” journalists set the stage for Kevin McCarthy to release the tapes to Carlson. If Beattie and Kelly had said nothing, too few American patriots would have demanded answers. McCarthy would have felt no compulsion to stick his neck out for the January 6 political prisoners.

This is the only way to bring the truth to light in this age of mass censorship against ideas that go against the government-prescribed narrative. Only a tiny handful of Americans are reading my Substack, visiting Revolver News, or combing through American Greatness. But millions of Americans turn on Tucker Carlson every night.

One of the reasons I love the work I do at The Liberty Daily and Discern Report is because I get to shine spotlights, dim as they may be, on news that Americans need. It’s often not the news that gets highlighted on Fox News. It doesn’t get a mention from Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro. It’s just too “fringe.” But if enough of us start sharing these stories and amplifying the truth, we can fight back against the Censorship Industrial Complex by clearing the way for “real” journalists and prompting them to reach the normies who still get their news from corporate media.

I’m often told something to the effect of, “I want to share your story but it could get me banned on Twitter/Facebook/YouTube.” This is true. I’ve been banned multiple times on multiple social media sites for sharing my own stories. Heck, I got banned from Spotify in early 2021 at a time when they claimed they wouldn’t censor anyone. But social media is just a tool. It’s not who I am. It’s not who you are. If a tool breaks, you get a new one. If a social account gets banned, you go elsewhere or start fresh. There’s nothing “precious” about these online accounts.

Congress will hold its hearings, but absolutely nothing will come out of DC that could even slow the Censorship Industrial Complex. It is self-perpetuating; those engaged in the lies need those lies protected through the telling of more lies and the suppression of the truth. They have too much at stake to let Tucker Carlson or Jim Jordan slow them down.

The Censorship Industrial Complex will continue to grow until the masses start speaking out against it. This is why “fake” journalists and their audiences need to compel “real” journalists to reach the masses with the truth. Otherwise, we will continue to see the vast majority of Americans spoon fed lies to keep them complacent, compliant, and docile.

I know this couldn’t have actually happened, and was just an extended hallucination (probably the result of the copious amount of drugs I consumed in my misspent youth, or the effects of a Commie bio-weapon with a fatality rate of less than one percent, because I’ve been writing about The War on Dissent (2018), and The Criminalization of Dissent (2021), and the global Corporate COINTELPRO op (2017), and The War on Reality (2021), and The Manufacturing of Reality (2021), and Manufacturing Truth (2018), and Manufacturing Normality (2016), and The Road to Totalitarianism (2022), and The Gaslighting of the Masses (2022) … well, for quite some time. So, I’m sure it was just an hallucination, because there’s no way Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how …

“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “The Apocalpytic Virus” …

32. In one remarkable email, the Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”

None of the leaders of this effort to police Covid speech had health expertise. pic.twitter.com/UUd50ZaghG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

… because that’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

I am also sure I was hallucinating yesterday, because, right in the middle of my hallucination, right around the time that Stacey Plaskett started squawking like a demon pterodactyl, I had another hallucination, like my hallucinating self was hallucinating, which was like being in a Christopher Nolan film. In this one, Matt asked me to talk about how I was being censored by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al., and their governmental and NGO partners in 2021, and I started babbling all this “conspiracy theory” stuff about the very “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” that Matt and Shellenberger were testifying about in the hallucination I appeared to be hallucinating the other hallucination in.

And then my hallucination got weird.

Now, it’s been quite a while since I’ve indulged in any seriously mind-bending drugs, but this reminded me of a bad LSD trip, like when Satan starts talking to you through the TV. There I was, happily hallucinating these two distinguished independent journalists who had done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance and had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all went dark and twisted.

Stacey Plaskett, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Matt and Shellenberger like Joe McCarthy in drag. Trembling with hatred, she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and “threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan, the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening remarks.

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some hate-drunk witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to resign as the DNC Chair for rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on. Sylvia Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in an ass-kicking contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents who conspired against him (i.e., Allred) personally, and then lectured Matt about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy theorist.” Stephen Lynch went full-McCarthy, demanding that the witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016 election.”

And so on. I told you things got twisted. Thank God it was just an hallucination and not a live, televised demonstration of precisely what I have been trying to describe the emergence of for the last six years, which is a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our “democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation, and even “malinformation,” and corporate-owned political puppets feel no compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on television because they know they have the fearsome power of the global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or absurd, and will spew their mindless hatred at whomever they are ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

Anyway, thank God that was just a bad flashback, or a minor cerebral infarction, or whatever, because, if it wasn’t … what a total bummer!

OK, seriously now, I assume that some of my regular readers might be confused by this essay. After all, I have been rather critical of Elon Musk and his handling of the “Twitter Files.” And now, here I am, celebrating Matt and Shellenberger’s testimony yesterday. Did I not call the Twitter Files a limited hangout? Yes, I did. And I will do it again. But not today. Today I will celebrate. I will raise a glass to Matt and Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and the other Twitter Files journalists. I will even raise a glass to Elon Musk (who continues to maliciously defame and censor me and others like me with fake “content warnings” and other such slimy censorship tactics) for making the Twitter Files available to them.

If that baffles you … well, let me tell you a secret.

The way this little ecosystem works is, writers like me don’t get to testify on television before subcommittees. Actual journalists get to do that. Actual journalists who are “normal” enough. Actual journalists like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, et al. You know who I’m talking about. Actual journalists who know where the lines are, who aren’t going to start babbling about “Pathologized Totalitarianism” and “The New Normal Reich” on national television. What writers like me do get to do (and what it is our job to do) is subtly influence, gently pressure, and pester the living hell out of actual journalists who still have a shred of integrity left by saying the things they cannot say, or saying them in a way that they cannot say them, until the time comes when they can almost say them, because we have said them over and over again, and more or less everyone can see them, so it is finally safe to say them, almost.

OK, sure, it doesn’t pay all that much, but it’s fun, and I tend to sleep fairly well.

So, don’t worry, I’ll get back to doing that shortly. The “Censorship-Industrial-Complex” is a much bigger story than just the US division. I’ll be prodding Matt and the other Twitter Files journalists to prod Elon Musk to bring in international journalists to cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Feel free to join in the fun. Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how this photo simultaneously appeared in every paper of record on the planet in January of 2020 … that is, if we’re not all locked away in “conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

In the meantime, kudos to the Twitter Files Team!

Article cross-posted from CJ’s blog.

If you can imagine any of those things, then you can understand the sheer bravery of Skyhorse Publishing for having Revolver News founder Darren Beattie write a long forward  for the January 6th Commission’s report.

Beattie has been the tip of the spear of courageous journalists exposing the Deep State’s plot to manufacture the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021. He has written profusely about people like Ray Epps, the so-called ” DNC pipe bomber,” and the mysterious Scaffold Commander. He has also openly accused the FBI of intentionally prompting the various “crimes” committed on that fateful day at the Capitol Building.

As Beattie says, it was a “Fedsurrection.”

Here’s an excerpt from his forward for the book, “The January 6th Report: The Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol“.

On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I sat with Beattie to discuss the Fedsurrection and other topics of extreme interest to Americans.