the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives...

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian eradication of free speech is the theatrical takedown of Jack Teixeira.

Substack’s days are numbered. The email newsletter platform is increasingly under attack, most recently by the ADL. The organization wrote on April 3 that Substack “continues to attract extremists and conspiracy theorists who routinely use the site to profit from spreading antisemitism, misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

BY KURT NIMMO

The latest salvo by ADL against the First Amendment dovetails with a congressional push to further erode liberty with its draconian RESTRICT Act. There are a number of tweets that encapsulate the latest threat to liberty, but Substack no longer allows tweet embeds, thanks to an absurd ego-colliding tiff between Substack CEO Chris Best and Twitter boss, Elon Musk.

The RESTRICT Act is dressed up as a response to Tik Tok and China. Contrary to this propaganda, it will be used primarily to sanitize the internet and squash (and criminalize) all speech diverting from USG narratives.

“The Restrict Act Completes the Overthrow of the US Constitution,” writes Paul Craig Roberts. “The purpose is to silence all dissent from official explanations. Truth is criminalized. Propaganda and lies will reign supreme and unchallenged. The Matrix will be complete.”

Connor O'Keeffe writes for the Mises Institute,

With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

The crowning propaganda achievement of the next phase of authoritarian control over free speech is the theatrical SWAT takedown of 21-year-old patsy Jack Teixeira, a low-level National Guard airman that, according to The Washington Post, somehow managed to get his hands on highly classified CIA and DOD documents. This is highly improbable, but then a blindsided American public is routinely fed improbable lies, exaggerations, and omissions by the USG and its corporate propaganda media.

CNN describes the event as a “carefully choreographed arrest,” and I’d agree with that assessment, although not as a result of the “Biden administration’s scramble” to contain sensitive leaks. The theatrical takedown of Mr. Teixeira is a propaganda event designed to bolster further eradication of dissent and grease the skids for the passage of RESTRICT.

The Washington Post has a documented history of working with the CIA to disseminate propaganda, so when we learn that the newspaper “wrote about the presence of problematic content on Substack, noting its use by spreaders of false information,” according to the ADL, we know for certain Substack will be brought to heel. (For more on the CIA’s takeover of the media, see The CIA and the Press: When the Washington Post Ran the CIA’s Propaganda Network, by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn).

Add to this the Digital Services Act. It is “the EU’s latest incoming tech rulebook requiring them to stamp out illegal content on their platforms… including social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. These include quickly taking down flagged illegal content, including hate speech,” Politico reported last October. The corporate propaganda conduit conflated “hate speech” (that is, speech contrary to the narratives of the state) with “child pornography and terrorist videos.”

According to Slate, the Digital Services Act (DSA),

while written to protect EU residents, will almost certainly lead social media firms to change their moderation policies worldwide. Thus, with the DSA, the EU will effectively be doing what the First Amendment ostensibly prohibits our own government from doing: regulating the editorial judgments made by social media platforms on which Americans communicate with each other.

The jaws of the authoritarian vice are tightening. In the near future, the ability to express your opinion will be terminated if it runs counter to official government narratives. All avenues of expression are to be tightly monitored, moderated and censored at the behest of the state.

“The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spot classified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks,” NBC News reported on April 12. “The administration is now looking at expanding the universe of online sites that intelligence agencies and law enforcement authorities track.”

Undoubtedly, this will include Substack, one of the last remaining platforms where free speech is permissible without the heavy-handed interference of the state, and the narrowly focused and highly politicized censorship agenda of the ADL and other anti-First Amendment organizations.

https://kurtnimmo.substack.com/p/substack-dead-man-walking

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By Gus Leonisky at 19 Apr 2023 - 6:25am
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hushed....

Matt Taibbi: The Crackdown Cometh

On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The Washington Post went with “charismatic gun enthusiast"....

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn as having been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.

When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.

Watch how this thing will be spun. It’s going to get ugly fast.

https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/14/matt-taibbi-the-crackdown-cometh/

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By Gus Leonisky at 19 Apr 2023 - 8:01am
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twitter carrots.....

Twitter will conceal so-called “hate speech” that violates its rules behind a warning screen that requires a click-through, the platform announced on Monday in a blog post.

The new policy is supposed to give moderators more choices than simply the binary 'leave up versus take down' approach typical to most content moderation, Twitter said.

In addition to being hidden behind a warning screen reading “Visibility limited: this Tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against Hateful Conduct,” offending tweets will be excluded from search results, trends, and “recommended” screens, with other down-ranking options possible. Advertising will not appear near them.

The new policy is meant to embody the “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” paradigm that Musk first teased after acquiring the platform in November, when speculation was still swirling regarding whether he would deliver on his promises to liberate Twitter from corporate state censors.

At the time, he promised that “negative/hate tweets”would be “max deboosted & demonetized,” unlinked to ads, and excluded from all but the most specific search results.

Bringing deboosting – a key part of the once-secretive practice of shadow-banning – out into the open better aligns this form of moderation with Twitter’s “commitment to transparency,” the platform said in its explanation of the new policy.

Users will be able to “submit feedback on the label” if they disagree with Twitter’s actions, and while this does not mean anyone will read or respond to the feedback, a proper appeals process is reportedly in the works.

Twitter revealed that while the labels are currently destined solely for violations of the Hateful Conduct policy, the platform plans to expand them to “other applicable policy areas in the coming months” so as to ensure “enforcement actions” become “more proportional and transparent for everyone on our platform.”

The platform came under fire earlier this month for turning its “enforcement actions” against users of the blogging platform Substack, which recently rolled out a Twitter-like function called Notes. Tweets containing Substack links were deboosted and replies disabled, while new tweets could not be posted. Several prominent Substack users left the platform, including Matt Taibbi, the journalist hand-selected by Musk to publish the ‘Twitter Files’ and expose the “censorship-industrial complex” the billionaire is supposedly determined to dismantle.

Musk has since replaced stick with carrot, offering Twitter users the chance to monetize their content and keep all the money they earn the first year.

https://www.rt.com/news/574967-twitter-hate-speech-deboost-shadowban/

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