The Great ‘Disinformation’ Hoax
Writer Jacob Siegel has talked to UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers about America’s new censorship complex. In a 13,000 word essay for Tablet, Siegel (pictured) explains how ‘disinformation’ is an invention that has morphed into a tool of governance. He told Sayers:
Disinformation is a means by which the Government in cooperation with private tech companies and civil society, NGO groups, censors, uses extra-legal means to censor political discourse around issues like Covid vaccinations, lockdowns, the elections. And in the U.S., it’s a free-for-all. It’s a blank cheque to censor anything. So on one level, disinformation is ostensibly censorship in order to protect national security. In a larger sense, that machinery of censorship is not opportunistically looking to erase certain things from the public record that are unflattering to political elites. It’s actually rather more than that. It is a means of governance. It is a system of power. It is its own system of power, outside of the formal, official — in the U.S., constitutional — means by which the Government is supposed to operate.
How did this ‘tool of governance’ become so mainstream, asks Sayers? The U.S. Government, Siegel points out, has long engaged in promoting disinformation of its own, but the ‘war on disinformation’ was begun by Barack Obama. One of the last things the former President did while in office was sign into law the ‘Countering Foreign Disinformation Act’, which fully committed the U.S. to a counter-disinformation campaign, which according to Siegel “was really always in spirit, and very quickly in practice as well, an information war directed against the American people”.
Siegel continues:
There was originally this foreign dimension… But from the very beginning, ‘foreign’ is a kind of ruse that’s setting up what is actually a much larger, effectively omni-directional structure, because the internet is global, that can censor anywhere but which is, in practice, focused on the domestic political environment inside the U.S. and specifically on this populist surge, which is taken as an existential threat by the ruling party officials in the U.S. who see populism in truly apocalyptic terms.
Siegel argues that the consequences of this censorship for American society should not to be minimised:
The system of secrecy and the Government’s own promotion of conspiracies, like the idea that Donald Trump was an agent of Vladimir Putin or a Russian stooge, which the U.S. intelligence agencies promoted. It’s not simply that they are wrong or pernicious, or that this reflects corruption. They actually drive people crazy. They deranged the political system. They ruin the ability for people to engage sanely and transparently in their own politics.
Worth reading (and watching) in full.
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Populist————-A person who does not blindly accept government’s version of reality. —————Governments are apparently less trusted now than ever before, and for good reason. Because they seek to hijack “science” and “experts” and turn those into “official science” and the “tyranny of experts” in support of their political goals. The “populist” is simply aware of that.
The single down vote nutter strikes again.
Possibly because, despite its popularity, it has virtually nothing to do with the article.
Actually it has much to do with the article when it says “the populist surge is taken as an existential threat by ruling party officials in the US who see populism in truly apocalyptic terms”————–To my way of thinking this part of the article suggests those in power like to name call and ridicule any who don’t agree with their world view as “populists”, in an attempt to claim they are some kind of eccentric or maverick dreamers who won’t accept the truth. ——-So “Nothing to do with the article” ????? —Nope.
There was a major interview on Bannon’s WarRoom yesterday whereby the US Government has colluded with Twitter to throttle ‘disinformation’ inconvenient to its own agenda.
To be honest, anyone using Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Facebook deserves all they get. There are plenty of safer alternatives such as Rumble, Telegram and GETTR.
I flushed my whole social media set up 3 years ago, the difference in exposure of what is really occurring v the MSM is night and day.
Government would be so easy if it wasn’t for subversive populist elements spreading inconvenient facts and truth.
Focus on individual face-to-face interactions. Invest in your neighbours. Local communities will beat these megalomaniacs.
I’m not so sure. Most people I know are fully taken in by MMGW and Covid etc
Then maybe you need to get out more, get to know more people! Seriously, we all need to get out more. I totally agree with ‘Marcus Aurelius knew’. We all spend too much time looking at screens, and miss the magic of live events, live concerts, live theatre, live football matches, face-to-face interactions, chatting to check-out staff instead of self-service check-outs, visiting small shops and markets where people enjoy talking, the more we talk to people, the more we can stay in reality. I went to see Van Morrison a couple of nights ago, it was sold out, all ages in the audience, young and old, and I’m sure nobody had in their heads that he was some kind of ‘misinformation spreader’ or ‘crazy conspiracy theorist’ because everyone was simply enjoying the music too much. There’s a magic in being at events with other people which is absent when watching a screen. Nobody had to preach that Van Morrison was correct, because just being there was an answer to his critics. Van was in great form, as were his mainly quite elderly band. He has been performing and touring for 60 years. Just seeing him performing and looking so well… Read more »
Cheers, gkig!
Face to face contact takes natural precedence. It’s the only way to overcome the dominance of the greatest propaganda tool which has ever existed, i.e., the smartphone in combination with the internet (the latter being now owned by a handful of rich individuals with agendas).
Why else do you think “they” made leisure pursuits “illegal” and told us all to stay at home and not speak to our fellow commoners?!
Keeping people home and thus glued to social media for social interaction did have purposeful consequences. A friend was bemoaning her 30-yo daughter, educated at great sacrifice at Catholic schools, who has rejected religion and apparently family: “She’s big on creating boundaries, like those Buzzfeed articles of spoilt young people: ‘You just had a baby, make people come to you’ and ‘Don’t spend your holiday visiting both families—it’s your day too!’ Five years ago she liked our holiday traditions, with church as part of it; post-COVID, she’s kind of anti-church. I keep hearing others my age complain that their kids won’t baptize the grandchild after being raised in the church, and that’s us too.”
Can’t believe the DM ran an article touching on the possible causal relationship between the death jabs and excess mortality in Australia.
”Senator Rennick argued after the vaccine rollout in April, 2021, all-cause excess deaths jumped by 1,000 and later 2,000 a month.
He argued that states with low or no Covid such as Western Australia and Queensland saw jumps of 9 and 10 per cent in deaths respectively.
‘We need to look to see how many people died within a number of days from the vaccine, we need to look at the average rate of daily deaths,’ Senator Rennick said in parliament.
Nations around the world are experiencing a surge in excess deaths, not all of which is explained by Covid.
In Britain, 650,000 extra deaths were registered in 2022, which represented a nine per cent increase compared to the more ‘normal year’ of 2019.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11940039/Australian-excess-deaths-record-highs-Covid-diabetes-dementia.html
Its called a “limited hangout”
Don’t accept the media’s version of reality.
Don’t accept the government’s version of reality.
Don’t accept the opposition’s version of reality.
Don’t accept the science’s version of reality.
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What arrogance it is for the political class to think their current opinions are completely correct and functional that no opposition or contrary views are to be allowed. They must be unbearable to live with, maybe that is why so many have partners with public coincident views or they have multiple divorces/separations.
when their policies turn out to be erroneous, even to the most credulous, they will use their misinformation to re-write history that way they are never responsible, never accountable and never have to explain themselves.
we would be back before printing was invented when information was disseminated by village clerics according to the requirements of their seignure: pipe or king.
Dissidents and I guess that is what we are, holding the views that we do, have always found ways to get the truth ‘out there’. It’s true that many of our fellow humans don’t want to hear the truth, can’t hear it, won’t hear it because it challenges everything they think is solid and true. And that’s OK because the path they have chosen is not ours. Ours is the more difficult path, ours has the more potential for pitfalls but once you know, you know, and there is absolutely no way of turning back. We walk in the truth for freedom, compassion, and justice. So they can try and stifle us, suffocate us and wring our necks but we will never cease in what we do and what we say. They can’t kill all of us although they’ll probably have a damn good go but we have the best thing going for us: the truth and when you walk with the truth in your heart, with that conviction, that you want the best for all humankind, there is nothing stronger. Yes, they have bullets and jails and camps but it’s so boring to be even one little bit afraid… Read more »
The idea of disinformation/misinformation is based upon the idea that the authorities are infallible, cannot be wrong, should not be criticized and scrutinized, and that all other opinions are therefore wrong.
Some disagree with the idea that the authorities are infallible and can never be wrong.