Lux Lucet

We are facing an unprecedented, coordinated campaign… of deplatforming, shadow banning, filtering and other foul means of putting dissenting voices into a digital gulag. While the mailed globe belongs to the tech giants and the executives, the hand inside is the government’s.

– Jim Jatras

Early Saturday morning while frequenting a favorite website, I came across a headline that read “Tech Tyranny: The Cries Are Becoming Screams From the Rooftops.”

Curious, I clicked on the link which took me to an article on big tech censorship. At the bottom of the article was an embedded video of Tucker Carlson’s program from Friday night. Carlson, as it happened, had dedicated his entire 8/31 show to big tech censorship.

Since Carlson is one of the few mainstream journalists who rises to the level of interesting, my curiosity was piqued. But when I went to play the video, instead of Tucker Carlson’s show, the only thing that appeared on my screen were the words “This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service.”

“How’s that for irony,” I said aloud to no one in particular. “YouTube just made Carlson’s point for him.”

In fairness, when I went back and checked today, Carlson’s video was back up. So, at least for now, the Silicon Valley Ministry of Truth has deigned to allow us minions to view the program.

Now in response to the increasingly aggressive censorship of conservative, libertarian and other dissenting voices, some people have argued that as private companies, the tech giants – and here I’m referring to companies such as Google (Google owns YouTube), Facebook, Twitter and Apple, all of which have had a hand in attempting to silence conservatives – have a right to police their own platforms and boot whomever they want.

As a staunch defender of property rights, I agree. If YouTube wants to ban Alex Jones, as a private company they have every right to do so.

But what if it’s not quite as simple as that? As John Robbins noted, events do not explain themselves, but must themselves be explained. The rise of the internet has allowed those who dissent from the official narrative.  What do I mean by narrative?  By this term I mean the context in which various world events are explained.  The power to explain events is the power to place them within a larger context, that is, within a larger narrative.

Mika Brzenziski of MSNBC famously let the cat out of the bag when she openly complained about Donald Trump’s challenging the mainstream media’s ability to control explanations. She was concerned that Trump had undermined the media’s messaging ability and that he was telling “people exactly what to think.” She continued, “That is our job [telling people exactly what to think].”

What if all the attacks on those who dissent from the official narrative as put forth by the government and the government’s willing accomplices in the press are not just a case of private firms using private means to police their platforms? What if this represents an attempt by the Deep State and by its establishment supporters to regain control of the narrative from independent online journalists by silencing them?

What if Jim Jatras is right and that the Tech Left’s, “unprecedented, coordinated campaign…of deplatforming, shadow banning, filtering and other foul means of putting dissenting voices into digital gulags,” is being done at the behest of powerful, vested interests in the government and the tech companies are merely the Deep State’s means of carrying out its attempt to regain narrative control?

If this is correct, then the deplatforming, shadow banning etc. we’ve seen over the past couple years, and especially the past few months, isn’t just a case of private companies behaving badly, but represents the merger of state and corporate powers – the merger of state and corporate powers is the classic definition of fascism – to control what people think.

It is the studied opinion of this author that this is precisely what is going on. Or as the quote from Jim Jatras at the top of this post reads, “While the mailed glove belongs to the tech giants and the executives, the hand inside is the government’s.”

The Case Against the Government and the Tech Left

As you may expect, it takes a bit of work to make the case that the government and the Tech Left have colluded to shut down dissenting voices. One isn’t likely to find direct evidence such as an email from the NSA to Mark Zuckerberg reading, “Let’s team up to find a way to shut down Alex Jones.”

No. Making the case for a fascist partnership between the Deep State and the tech giants is a matter of piecing together circumstantial evidence. Circumstantial evidence is indirect evidence requiring the use of inference to prove one’s point. Circumstantial evidence, by definition, is open to more than one interpretation.

But this does not mean one cannot build a powerful case using circumstantial evidence. If, after fairly considering all the evidence at one’s disposal, an investigator sees that it points to one conclusion, it is fair to consider the case proven.

With this in mind, let’s consider the evidence at our disposal.

First, Obama’s call for “truthiness tests.” As was noted in part one of this series, in October 2016, then president Barak Obama complained that people were becoming increasingly distrustful of the news and said, “We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to. There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”

Here we have a sitting president calling for the establishment of a 1984-style ministry of truth.

Second, the CIA’s control of the mainstream news media. When one speaks of the CIA’s control of the mainstream media (hereafter, MSM), it is to be expected that many will dismiss such statements as “conspiracy theory.” But for all that, the CIA’s use of the MSM to push government propaganda is well established.

In his 1977 article “The CIA and the Media,” noted journalist Carl Bernstein observed that,

The agency’s [CIA’s] dealings with the press began during the earliest stages of the Cold War. Allen Dulles, who became director of the CIA in 1953, sought to establish a recruiting-and-cover capability within America’s most prestigious journalistic institutions…

American publishers, like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time, were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle against ‘global Communism.’ Accordingly, the traditional line separating the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable: rarely was a news agency used to provide cover for CIA operatives abroad without the knowledge and consent of either its principal owner, publisher or senior editor. Thus, contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America’s leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.

Bernstein even gave examples of editors and news organizations that cooperated with the CIA: William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, ABC, NBC and the Associated Press.

These are some of the largest, most influential news organizations in the American media, all of which were involved to some degree with the CIA. Although it’s never been officially acknowledged, the CIA’s name for its practice of using news organizations as propaganda fronts is Operation Mockingbird.

The scope of the CIA’s influence was not limited to news organizations. Wired Magazine ran a story in 2011 titled “CIA Pitches Scripts to Hollywood,” which highlighted the long-running relationship between the CIA and the entertainment industry.

“I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services.”

– Udo Ulfkotte, former editor of the Frankfurter Allgemein

Nor are the CIA’s efforts limited to operations inside the US. Udo Ulfkotte, a high ranking editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, wrote a book in 2014 titled Gekaufte Journalisten [Bought Journalists] in which he explained the sway intelligence agencies had on respected journalists.

In a 2014 interview, Dr. Ulfkotte explained,

I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service. Most journalists from respected and big media organisations (sic) are closely connected to the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantik-Brücke or other so-called transatlantic organisations (sic)…once you’re connected, you make friends with selected Americans. You think they are your friends and you start cooperating. They work on your ego, make you feel like you’re important. And one day one of them will ask you “Will you do me this favor…”

Much more could be said about the connection between the CIA and the MSM. But even this limited sample prompts the question, If the CIA is that involved in the MSM, is it reasonable to think they may be up to similar tricks when it comes to social media?

In this author’s estimation, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) uber creepy logo for its Information Awareness Office.   DARPA is the same Pentagon agency that spawned the Lifelog project discussed below.

Third, there is abundant evidence showing the CIA and other arms of the Deep State have direct involvement with social media. One doesn’t need to rely solely on inference from Operation Mockingbird for evidence of the CIA’s involvement with Big Tech. For example:

• Social Media Is a Tool of the CIA, Seriously: Writing in, of all places, CBS News, Jim Edwards discusses the CIA’s own venture capital firm called In-Q-Tel. In case your unfamiliar with how venture capital firms work, think about the popular series Shark Tank where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to wealthy investors, hoping to receive from them the capital needed to get their ideas into production. The article details Google’s relationship with the CIA which, Edwards reports, stretches back to 2004.
  
• Fortune recently reported that “Facebook is partnering with the Atlantic Council in another effort to combat election-related propaganda and misinformation from proliferating on its service.” So just who is the Atlantic Council? It’s NATO’s Washington D.C. based think tank. That is to say, it’s an arm of the establishment now tasked with enforcing the establishment’s message on Facebook.
  
• In November 2017, top officials from Facebook, Twitter and Google made an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and were ordered to quash information rebellions on their sites (Former FBI agent says tech companies must “silence” sources of “rebellion”).
  
• Along these same lines, shortly after last the August purge of Alex Jones Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy ominously tweeted, “Inforwars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.”
  
• In his book The Deep State, former Congressional aid Mike Lofgren observed, “the NSA [National Security Agency] has made itself completely dependent upon Silicon Valley for the technology necessary for it to do its mission” (p.166) and that, “While Washington could simply dragoon the high-technology companies to do its bidding, it prefers cooperation with so important an engine of the nation’s economy” (p.160).
  
• Researcher James Corbett has reported that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced closing its Lifelog project on February 4, 2004, which coincidently is the same day Facebook launched. Corbett describes Lifelog as a, “project to create an automatically updated, itemized, organized, electronic list of every interaction you have, every event you attend, every place you go and everything you do.” As Corbett notes in his video, Facebook received early funding from what appear to be CIA front organizations. Additional information on this obviously unconstitutional project can be found in this story from Wired.
  
• Amazon’s $600 million cloud computing contract servicing all 17 American intelligence agencies. As a retailer rather than a social media company, Amazon to this point has not come up in this discussion. But it would be remiss of me not to mention that beginning in 2014 Amazon’s $600 million cloud service for all 17 US intelligence agencies, the CIA included, came online. Given the all-too-cozy relationship between US intelligence and the social media outlets, it would behoove consumers to think twice before inviting Amazon’s popular Echo Dot smart speaker with Alexa into their homes. Installing one of these listening devices may be little different than bugging your own home on behalf of the CIA or any other agency who wants to eavesdrop on your life.
  
• Complete lack of interest in regulatory oversight of Big Tech. In the 1990’s, Microsoft came under scrutiny of federal regulators for putting its Windows operating systems on new computers. Microsoft, claimed the government, was engaging in monopolistic practices and needed to have its wings clipped. But here in 2018, despite Big Tech firms such as Facebook, Google and Amazon possessing extraordinary market dominance, government regulators are nowhere to be seen. Raising this question should not be taken that I endorse federal anti-trust legislation. I do not. But the silence from government regulators in the face of the near-monopolies enjoyed by these firms is thunderous. Perhaps this is a quid pro quo granted to these firms for allowing the government to access the data they collect on their users. Conversely, some have argued that Big Tech firms would welcome government regulation, in order to stop competition. We shall explore this latter possibility in a future installment.
  

One could go on, but the above should suffice for now to show that the government is indeed involved with social media, having both a cooperative as well as at times an adversarial relationship with Big Tech firms.

Closing Thoughts

Roman epicurean philosopher Lucretius famously wrote his treatise De Rerum Natura in poetic verse rather than, as one would expect, in prose. So why did Lucretius take this unusual step? As he himself explained it, “philosophy is medicine for the soul and that the charms of verse can function like the honey that doctors smear on the rim of a cup of bitter medicine” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

So why do I bring this up? Because there is a distinct and disturbing possibility that the social media so many of us have come to use and rely on in our everyday lives is, to a significant extent, the Deep State’s honey which it uses to get us to volunteer far more information about ourselves than it ever could extract on its own.

This point is not original with me. Rather, several observers have been amazed at how willing people are to divulge their personal information to social media companies in exchange for the perceived benefits offered by these firms.

Instead of Big Brother imposing himself on us kicking and screaming, we invite him into our homes and lives willingly.

What is this if not evil genius?

The present state of social media discrimination against conservatives and the government’s clearly unconstitutional use of these media to spy on the people raise a number of questions for Christians. Very clearly, earlier generations rightly would have been appalled at the technologically driven, dystopian loss of privacy and ideologically targeted censorship which characterize the present day.

Are Christians simply supposed to quietly accept the way things are and go about their business? On the other hand, are we to join those who demand Congress sic federal regulators on Big Tech for its clearly ideologically based discrimination against those who would challenge the official narrative?

Would it be better if Christians simply abandoned social media altogether, went off grid, and lived the life of a 19th century pioneer in some remotely located log cabin?

Are there any actions Christians can take in the short term and the long term to limit and/or eliminate the abuses of power carried out by the combined forces of the government and the giant social media firms?

Does the Bible provide any answers to these questions?

Lord willing, we shall takes up these questions next week.