[9/7/16] The establishment’s false narratives about the world are imploding in spectacular fashion thanks to the Internet, and the establishment’s propagandists are increasingly being called out for their deception. That has the establishment extremely upset. So upset, in fact, that establishment propagandists and the federal government are busy demonizing online freedom and concocting ways to clamp down on voices that expose the false narratives. But Americans can stop it.
From abolishing and censoring comment sections on establishment media websites to squandering Americans’ tax money on stopping online “trolls” and even creating government-controlled troll accounts to manipulate public opinion, the establishment is going all out to prop up the alternative reality it seeks to create in the public consciousness. Overt censorship and war on free speech are increasingly being employed even by Western governments and U.S. tech companies.
But thanks to the World Wide Web and the proliferation of alternative voices, the establishment’s efforts to stop the truth appear to be failing catastrophically in the United States — at least for now. Indeed, just six percent of Americans say they trust the establishment media in surveys. And the numbers keep plunging.
Of course, it is true that there are “trolls” on the Internet, and that they do try to deceitfully manipulate public opinion. Ironically, though, much of the trolling — in the real sense of the term — appears to be coming from governments and high-priced “public-relations” giants in the employ of governments and mega-corporations. The Kremlin, for example, was widely accused in media reports of operating an alleged “troll army” out of a “troll factory” based in Saint Petersburg. In 2011, meanwhile, a PR firm in Communist China admitted to employing 800 people to operate 20,000 separate accounts to comment online.
More recently, official documents from the U.K. government’s bombastically named “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” exposed the fact that the government in London was operating a massive operation involving “behavioral science,” social-media trolls, and online propaganda. The plot included posting fake comments online. The goal: manipulate public opinion, promote “conformity” and “obedience,” and destroy critics of the establishment narrative at home and abroad.
The Obama administration was exposed before that plotting a similar scheme to operate “sock puppets” on social media that promote Obama’s propaganda. The deception was supposed to be run by the military, though it is not clear what happened to the extremist and unconstitutional plan after it got exposed in the world media. Obama has also been plotting to impose Internet national “IDs” to end anonymity.
With establishment trolls apparently no match for the millions or even billions of real people disgusted with globalism, open borders, perpetual war, political corruption, Big Government, crony capitalism, monetary-system fleecing, and other establishment assaults on humanity, insiders now appear to be trying different tactics. Instead of relying on government trolls and propaganda, or perhaps alongside those tactics, the establishment is seeking to demonize those who do spread the truth as “trolls,” and then crush them and their free-speech rights.
A big step in that direction came on August 18, when the increasingly irrelevant establishment organ Time magazine published a screed alleging that “trolls are ruining the Internet.” Incredibly, in the cover story no less, establishment propagandist Joel Stein described as “trolls” the people who “relish” what he calls “online freedom” — the online ability to speak freely, anonymously, and without establishment gatekeepers to censor thought-crimes. He also deceptively tries to link “online freedom” with “hate” before suggesting that action needs to be taken to keep everyone’s feelings safe from mean old Internet trolls.
Stein first blasts online anonymity, dishonestly attempting to associate it with encouraging depressed people to kill themselves. “Psychologists call this the online disinhibition effect, in which factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores society spent millennia building,” he writes, after claiming, ludicrously, that “if you tell it [the Internet] you’re struggling with depression it will try to goad you into killing yourself.”
Of course, Time‘s attack on anonymity not withstanding, anonymous speech has been a crucial part of America and the Western world for centuries — since before the U.S. Constitution formally brought the United States into existence…CONTINUE READING