'Demons are Losing Control': Influencers React to Pavel Durov's Detainment

The CEO and founder of the encrypted social media app, Telegram, Pavel Durov, was arrested on August 24 at Le Bourget airport near Paris as he was departing his private jet.

Durov's arrest has triggered a heated debate with most influencers seeing it as an onslaught on free speech. A hashtag #FreeDurov popped up on X.

Former US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeted: "France just arrested Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of the encrypted and uncensored Telegram platform. The need to protect free speech has never been more urgent."

Naomi Seibt, a German conservative political activist, dubbed anti-Greta by the Washington Post, alleged on X:

"Why do you think they just arrested the owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov? This is a test run. They are setting a precedent. Their ultimate target is Elon Musk."

Candace Owens, an African American conservative television presenter, tweeted: "The trouble with free speech is that it disallows the media to set the narrative. They used to be able to justify war to you in a faraway land. Now you can see the reality of what they are doing. This is why Pavel Durov has been arrested - because the demons are losing control."

Italian film producer, Robin Monotti, remarked on X: "Pavel Durov is facing up to 20 years in Macron's dungeons for refusing to censor content on behalf of the globalist oligarchy and their war machine."

Do Western Governments Want to Control Telegram Better?

In addition to ridiculing France's accusations against Durov, social media users recall that the Telegram CEO had told US journalist, Tucker Carlson, that Western intelligence agencies were after him, apparently seeking to use his platform to spy on users. As of 2024, the messenger has around 900 million monthly active users.

Mario Nawfal, named an "omnipresent Twitter celebrity" by NBC, wondered why Western corporate press stays mute about the Telegram CEO's arrest.

"Why aren't there articles on mainstream media about Pavel Durov, the CEO and founder of Telegram, being arrested in France because people allegedly used his app to commit 'crimes'? Why the silence?" he asked on X.

In a separate tweet, the influencer alleged that "the US wanted to control Telegram better."

He cited an excerpt from Durov's interview to Carlson, in which the Russian tech prodigy described how US cyber-security officers approached a Telegram engineer seeking a backdoor to the messenger. "Whenever I would go to the US, I would have two FBI agents greet me at the airport, asking questions," Durov said at the time.

For his part, crypto investor, Shaun Maguire, compared Durov's detainment to Vint Cerf and Rob Kahn (inventors of TCP and IP) being arrested because the Internet "is being used for drug dealers to communicate with each other, and they were unwilling to install a back door." Elon Musk agreed on this observation with one word – "Exactly."

Robert Malone, a US medical doctor and an infectious-disease researcher, who threw into question the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, also took to X to comment on Durov's arrest: "I am sickened by Pavel Durov's arrest. France is another unsafe country to travel to. The Western world has gone crazy."

Kim Dotcom, an X conservative influencer, warned that "the crackdown against free speech escalates."

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240825/demons-are-losing-control-influencers-react-to-pavel-durovs-detainment-1119901354.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

For 45 years I’ve read the New York Times in its print edition almost each and every morning, along with the Wall Street Journal. Until about a decade ago, I also read four of California’s leading newspapers in similar fashion, but as they declined into just shadows of what they once had been, I abandoned them, a decision made easier when the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee stopped local delivery in my area; and given the huge decline in the quality of the Times in recent years, one of these days it may suffer the same fate. Meanwhile, for the last quarter century, I’ve balanced these very mainstream morning sources of information with a wide variety of extremely alternative news and opinion websites on the Internet, whose offerings have always provided a very different view of those same events.

I’d never spent much time watching cable news or other TV offerings, regarding them as merely presenting a diluted and dumbed-down version of what was contained in those print newspaper articles, probably providing about 1% of the same mainstream information, but often distorted in foolish ways. The sole exception had been the once much higher-quality PBS Newshour, and I think I abandoned it around the time of the Iraq War, while I stopped reading my weekly issues of the Economist at the same time and for the same reason.

However, since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in early 2022, I’ve begun closely following a couple of YouTube channels, featuring podcast interviews of numerous very knowledgeable individuals, able to offer a wealth of important information and analysis. In particular, Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former longtime FoxNews host, has gradually accumulated an extremely strong collection of regular guests, and I usually spend at least several hours each week absorbing their cogent views on the Ukraine war, the Israel/Gaza conflict, and other geopolitical events, finding their material vastly superior to the nonsense I casually see in my morning Times, let alone the total junk that presumably dominates all the various cable shows.

Just as a snowball rolling downhill accretes mass, Napolitano’s willingness to provide a platform for those experts whose views differ from those permitted in our mainstream media outlets has led more and more such individuals to join his stable of guests.  John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University are two of our most distinguished academic scholars, enjoying enormous international reputations, with the latter having been personally involved at the highest level of Russian and Ukrainian political events for more than three decades.  Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, rising to become head of its Soviet Analysis group and also serving as the personal intelligence briefer to a half-dozen presidents, while former ambassador Chas Freeman held numerous senior government positions during his distinguished, half-century long career, whose earliest days included serving as President Richard Nixon’s personal translator during his historic 1972 meeting with China’s Chairman Mao.

As the longtime chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson spent many years participating in the highest levels of our national security decision-making process and Col. Douglas Macgregor has enjoyed a very strong military reputation, holding important positions in the Defense Department, while former British diplomat and senior MI6 officer Alastair Crooke had spent decades deeply involved in crucial Middle East negotiations. Military and intelligence experts such as Scott Ritter, Philip Giraldi, and Larry Johnson regularly provide their perspectives, as do younger journalists such as Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, and Anya Parampil of the Grayzone, along with various other recurring guests.

Under other circumstances, many of these figures would currently be serving near the very top of the American government and its foreign policy and national security apparatus, much as some of them had done in the past, or at least they would be prominently featured on our opinion pages or welcomed as regular guests on cable news shows. But all of them have instead been purged and almost entirely blacklisted both from government and from our mainstream media for their refusal to endorse an officially-promoted but totally Orwellian account of today’s world events.

Although hardly emphasized in our history books, such ideological media purges have not been uncommon throughout American history as I first discovered a couple of decades ago in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks and the political preparation for our disastrous Iraq War. The recent death of liberal talk show host Phil Donahueprompted me to recall that history, which I had described in a 2018 article:

The notion of a sweeping purge of media dissidents in the past seemed far easier for me to accept when I myself had witnessed something rather similar only a couple of years earlier, once again aimed at clearing away the obstacles to an American foreign war.

In the patriotic fervor following the 9/11 attacks, few national media figures dared challenge the plans and proposals of the Bush Administration, with Paul Krugman’s column at the Times being the rare exception; expressing “unpatriotic sentiments” as very broadly defined could severely impact a career. This was especially true of the electronic media, with its vastly greater reach and therefore subject to more extreme pressure. During 2002 and 2003, it was very uncommon to find an Iraq War naysayer anywhere on network television or among the fledgling cable alternatives, and even MSNBC, the least popular and most liberal of the latter soon began a sharp ideological crackdown.

For decades, Phil Donahue had pioneered the daytime television talk show, and in 2002 he revived it to high ratings on MSNBC, but in early 2003 his show was canceled, with a leaked memo indicated that his opposition to the looming war was the cause. Conservative Pat Buchanan and liberal Bill Press, both Iraq War critics, hosted a top-rated debate show on the same network, allowing them to spar with their more pro-Bush opponents, but it too was cancelled for similar reasons. If the cable network’s most famous hosts and highest rated programs were subject to summary termination, lesser ranking personalities surely drew the appropriate conclusions about the risks of crossing particular ideological lines.

My old friend Bill Odom, the three-star general who ran the NSA for Ronald Reagan and possessed among the strongest national security credentials in DC was similarly blacklisted from the media for his opposition to the Iraq War. Numerous other prominent media voices were “disappeared” around the same time, and even after Iraq became universally recognized as an enormous disaster, most of them never regained their perches.

• American Pravda: Our Great Purge of the 1940s
  The Unz Review • June 11, 2018 • 5,500 Words

A few years earlier I’d been prompted by Gen. Odom’s untimely passing to publish a somewhat related article in The American Conservative, documenting the massive, knowing lies told by the talking-head experts on cable shows, who had been paid large sums of money to deliberately misinform the American people.

We discovered how much their credibility was worth on April 20, when the New York Times—at long last—published an exposé, based on 8,000 pages of Pentagon e-mail and transcripts, about the business activities and financial ties of these supposedly dispassionate experts. CNN paid them as much as $1,000 per appearance, but most were simultaneously receiving vastly greater sums from their military procurement and government contracting work. For example, Gen. James Marks appeared regularly on cable news throughout 2006, even as he was involved in bidding, through his work with McNeil Technologies, for a $4.6 billion contract to provide translators in Iraq.

One might crudely say that the government owned 99 percent of these men while the news channels rented 1 percent—and then asked them their opinion of the government. Their financial futures were in the hands of the administration officials they were evaluating on television.

The White House played this relationship to full advantage. Bush officials routinely organized briefings to provide inside information to these pundits and to tailor their commentary. The New York Timesuncovered Pentagon documents describing the talking-head generals as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates,” who could be counted on to propagate the administration’s message “in the form of their opinions.” The Pentagon even hired Omnitec Solutions, a consulting company, to watch the television appearances and grade the performances of these purportedly neutral commentators. The reviews were then passed on to Bush appointees at the Pentagon who controlled the flow of procurement funding.

There are documented examples of retired generals believing that the situation in Iraq was an absolute disaster, but providing only the requested Happy News to millions of Americans seeking their wisdom on television. After returning from a government-sponsored trip to Iraq, Gen. Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst, told Alan Colmes, “You can’t believe the progress,” predicting that the insurgency would be reduced “to a few numbers” within months. But he later told the New York Times, “I saw immediately that things were going south in 2003.”

Many of these former high-ranking American military officers should have every right to request membership in the Screen Actors Guild, and in some cases their theatrical pay might place them near the upper end of the Hollywood wage scale. There is a particular word for military officers who trade away their own country’s national security interests for large financial payments, and it is not a pleasant one.

• The Life and Legacy of Lt. Gen. William Odom
  Ron Unz • The American Conservative • September 8, 2008 • 2,500 Words

Unlike during the early 2000s, YouTube and other popular video platforms have now technologically come of age, potentially allowing figures blacklisted by the mainstream media to provide their views to a worldwide audience. Indeed, the prescient 2014 presentation by John Mearsheimer on Ukraine has accumulated some 29 million views on YouTube, quite possibly more than any academic lecture in the history of the Internet, and those viewership figures would be the envy of almost any mainstream television broadcast on public policy matters.

For similar reasons, Napolitano’s YouTube podcast has now attracted well over 400,000 subscribers, and his individual interviews often reach 100,000 or more views, audience figures certainly comparable to many of the shows in the declining world of cable.

Unfortunately, there are serious potential risks in building a show on someone else’s media platform, and these became apparent earlier this month when Napolitano’s Judging Freedom podcast suddenly received a YouTube “strike,” forcing a week-long suspension of all livestream broadcasts, a development that shocked and greatly concerned me.

STATEMENT - My First Strike on Free Speech! -
On June 13, 2024, I published an interview featuring myself and journalist Pepe Escobar, where we engaged in a deep and critical discussion on global geopolitics. Our conversation was candid, tackling complex and often controversial topics that challenge the mainstream narratives. Unfortunately, this content was recently removed from YouTube, and I received a "first strike" on my channel—a decision that raises serious concerns about the limits of free speech on major digital platforms.

more from Judge here:
https://judgenap.com/my-first-strike-on-free-speech/

In recent years YouTube has regularly banned and purged channels that discuss especially “touchy” or controversial subjects, and three strikes within the period of a few months leads to the total annihilation of a channel and all of its hundreds or thousands of videos, a potentially devastating outcome. Large numbers of YouTube channels have suffered that fate, so many that a Wikipedia page lists many dozens of the most prominent examples.

I think that prior to Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory, YouTube and most other Internet platforms had prided themselves on their traditional support for free speech, maintaining a strongly permissive content policy. Videos or channels were only banned if they violated fairly clear rules regarding pornography, graphic violence, or copyright-infringement, and the list in that Wikipedia page seems to confirm this.

But late that year, the Pizzagate controversy suddenly erupted on the Internet, with various pro-Trump podcasters seizing on leaked DNC emails to suggest that some leading Democrats were involved in a pedophilia ring. This prompted a bizarre, highly-suspicious media crackdown on all such advocates, with various YouTube channels suddenly purged as a consequence. An entirely new precedent was set for ideological censorship and although those purged channels were too small to be listed in the Wikipedia entry, I later described this very strange situation in a 2019 article after the somewhat similar Jeffrey Epstein case finally broke in the media.

• American Pravda: John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 29, 2019 • 6,400 Words

Not along afterwards, a number of seemingly ridiculous stories appeared in the mainstream media claiming that a long list of anti-establishment websites—left, right, libertarian, or racialist—were actually deliberate agents of Russian propaganda, accusations that dovetailed with the ridiculous Russiagate hoax that bedeviled the Trump Administration for the next couple of years.

At the time these Russia propaganda accusations seemed so totally absurd—imagine libertarian Ron Paul running a pro-Russian “Fake News” website!—that I hardly took them seriously, and instead merely ridiculed them in a short column. But they provided a fig-leaf of legitimacy for platforms to break their longstanding commitments to free-speech and instead begin the suppression or banning of websites and channels disagreeable to America’s reigning political powers. This soon began, slowly at first but thenw ith increasing harshness over the next year or two.

Once such a precedent for purely ideological censorship has been set, it naturally tends to expand under political pressure, and I think it was around that time that the media reported that the ADL had brought in to help police speech on YouTube and various other popular social media platforms, as I discussed in a 2018 article.

By mid-2018 support for such political censorship on the Internet had grown to the point that YouTube took the dramatic step of banning the enormously popular channel of Alex Jones, a leading conspiracy-activist strongly supportive of President Trump and his policies, with Facebook, Spotify, and Apple simultaneously taking similar action, initially on a temporary basis but soon made permanent. Somewhat amorphous charges of “hate speech” or “harassment” began being regularly cited as an excuse to eliminate edgy or controversial channels, especially those run by right-wing creators who trafficked in “conspiracy theories” or racialist beliefs, with the purges accelerating in 2019.

These justifications were sometimes stretched in outrageous fashion. For example, with the possible exception of Arnold Toynbee, David Irving probably ranks as the most internationally successful British historian of the last one hundred years, with his brilliant books selling in the millions. I think it was around this time that all his many riveting public lectures on the true historical facts of World War II were purged from YouTube, along with those videos produced by individuals who challenged the official narrative of the Holocaust.

• The Remarkable Historiography of David Irving
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 4, 2018 • 1,700 Words

These ongoing YouTube purges were part of a much broader ideological sweep that also encompassed those books that the ADL particularly disliked. In March 2019 I noted the tremendous irony that Amazon had suddenly banned several outstanding works of scholarly black historiography during Black History Month:

• American Pravda: Amazon Book Censorship
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 11, 2019 • 7,600 Words

A few months later, YouTube purged the Red Ice channel of Henrik Palmgren, a right-wing Swede, whose work I had discovered a couple of years earlier. Palmgren was an outstanding interviewer, restrained yet probing, and someone willing to allow his knowledgeable guests to talk at considerable length about topics that never appeared in the mainstream media. He’d already amassed a large collection of one or two hour audio interviews on a very wide range of controversial or conspiratorial subjects, and I eventually listened to many of these, sometimes encountering for the first time historical threads that after lengthy, careful investigation became the subject of one of my American Pravda articles.

As recounted in the Wikipedia list, the purges continued during 2020, soon sweeping up many of those promoting conspiratorial views of the global Covid epidemic or who sharply challenged the massive Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the death of George Floyd in police custody. One of the prominent purge victims was libertarian podcaster Stefan Molyneux, whose channel had amassed over 900,000 subscribers.

This rapidly growing regime of political censorship inspired much dark humor during that period. Many began joking that these Internet platforms would soon decide to ban president of the United States, and to my total astonishment that was exactly what happened on January 13, 2021, as the channel of President Donald Trump was purged and he was simultaneously removed from most other social media platforms. Banning the sitting president of the United States clearly demonstrated that absolutely no one was immune from such highly-selective censorship, and indeed the channels of Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News Australia, and Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro were all soon suspended, allegedly for airing their contrary views on anti-Covid measures.

Content creators may invest years of their lives producing large numbers of videos and gradually building up an impressive list of tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Seeing all that accumulated effort destroyed in an instant for unexplained reasons by unaccountable authorities can have a devastating impact upon such individuals, and while some may then attempt to rebuild what they lost on a different platform, others do not. YouTube had been acquired by Google in 2006, becoming a division of that Internet giant, and Susan Wojcicki, one of the latter company’s earliest employees became its longtime CEO, under whose watch this censorship regime began and grew. Therefore, it was hardly surprising that her recent death from cancer at age 56 was greeted with delight by many of the fringe figures who had become outraged over those policies.

Over the years I had become inured to this severe climate of YouTube censorship, recognizing that there were many important things that could no longer be discussed in that venue for fear of immediate deplatforming. Unorthodox, “conspiratorial” views regarding the 9/11 Attacks or the JFK Assassination or major events of World War II seemed extremely risky, along with more recent controversies such as Covid origins and control measures as well as claims of a stolen 2020 election. There were never any clear rules about what could or could not be said, but individuals who apparently strayed over the line regularly disappeared with all of their content, especially if their channels were popular or growing rapidly, and exactly this element of uncertainty forced most podcasters to exercise enormous self-censorship, fearful of the terrible consequences of being unlucky enough to have their entire channel eliminated.

In theory, YouTube’s system of multiple-strikes provided some measure of warning that a channel was straying too close to the edge, but this policy was sometimes ignored. For example, Kevin Barrett had carefully restricted the videos on his TruthJihad channel to only his “international TV interviews, mostly with Tehran-based Press TV and Ofogh TV,” and he never received a single strike on these discussions with notable professors and pundits. But then YouTube suddenly eliminated his entire channel in April on grounds of “hate speech,” apparently because he’d repeatedly denounced Israel for committing what he—and the esteemed jurists of the International Court of Justice—considered a “genocide” in Gaza.

Late last year a youthful right-winger named Patrick Casey interviewed me a couple of times for the new channel he’d established and I’d thought our conversations on Affirmative Action and the Israel/Gaza conflict went quite well. But soon afterward, his young, strike-free channel was suddenly eliminated despite containing only about a dozen videos. An Irish podcaster named Keith Woods had invited me on around the same time, and he later told me that several short clips from my interview had done extremely well on Twitter, racking up well over a million impressions; but when he invited me back again, he was suddenly hit with a strike causing him to back off.

https://x.com/raymo_g/status/1738331791818109083?

Despite all of this, I never expected Napolitano’s channel to face such risks given that his regular guests included such extremely high-ranking individuals with fully respectable credentials, and the topics they covered in very sober fashion were fully mainstream issues such as the Russia-Ukraine war or the Israel-Gaza conflict. But just a week or two before his suspension from YouTube, a team of thirty FBI agents had raided the home of Former Chief UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter, one of his regular guests, and the combination of these events raised dark suspicions that the approaching elections might be prompting a heightened degree of media censorship and suppression.

Strikes against YouTube channels are often a sign of their looming elimination, but fortunately that wasn’t the case with Judging Freedom, and I was relieved that it resumed livestreaming once its one-week penalty expired. However, I was also glad to see that Napolitano had very sensibly established a backup channel on the Rumble video platform just in case future problems developed.

Effectively enforcing such YouTube censorship is obviously much more difficult if comparable alternative platforms exist for such content, and there now seems to be major drive to eliminate the most effective of of these.

Over the last couple of years, the powerful algorithms of Chinese-owned TikTok have sparked an exponential rise in its popularity among younger generations, and it has become a primary source of information about the horrific ongoing slaughter in Gaza. As a result, a leaked telephone call by the ADL leadership revealed that the powerful pro-Israel organization believed they had “a major TikTok problem,” and soon afterwards Congress suddenly passed legislation setting into motion a likely TikTok ban. Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has significantly shifted that platform back to its original free speech roots, and a few days ago the British government seemed to threaten him with arrest for his relative lack of censorship. Although not widely used in the West, the Telegram app is very popular in Russia and largely uncensored, and its Russian-born billionaire founder and CEO has just been arrested in France, apparently for allowing too much free speech for its 900 million users. If these three large platforms were brought into line, suppressing or intimidating the remainder would probably not be difficult.

This longstanding pattern of YouTube censorship had become very clear in my mind and although I was surprised to now see it extended to the distinguished commentators brought together by Andrew Napolitano, perhaps I shouldn’t have been. But I recently discovered what seemed to be a very striking exception to this pattern, which raised various questions.

Until just the last few weeks I’d only had the vaguest impression of Candace Owens, a popular black right-wing “influencer” on Twitter and other social media platforms, who had become a strong supporter of Donald Trump and his various policies and causes.

I don’t spend any time in such venues and I’d never read any of her articles—possibly because she’d never written any—so I assumed that she just ranted away on various right-wing issues, much like the many hundreds of her somewhat less successful competitors. Her lengthy, 13,000 word Wikipedia entry was naturally quite hostile, but its basic catalogue of facts presented is usually fairly reliable although skewed and biased, and these seemed to confirm my impression.

Apparently she’d spent the last few years as a leading figure on The Daily Wire, a right-wing media operation run by an activist named Ben Shapiro. Heavily-funded by various wealthy pro-Israel donors, its obvious goal was to encourage a younger generation of conservatives to become just as pro-Israel as their older counterparts. I don’t think I’d never read anything by Shapiro or any of his other contributors, so I tended to lump them all together in my mind. One long laundry-list of populist right-wing talking-points denouncing Muslims, Mexican immigrants, Black Lives Matter protesters, Covid vaxxing, and Bill Gates always seemed much the same as another.

However, to her very considerable credit, the horrific ongoing slaughter of Gaza’s helpless civilians seems to have deeply moved her, and as a strongly-committed Christian she had Tweeted out the biblical phrase “Blessed are the Peacemakers” last November while also declaring that no one can “serve both God and money.” This was widely seen as an implicit call for a ceasefire in Gaza and an explanation of why so few other mainstream conservatives or media figures were willing to take that same position. Viewed some 16.4 million times, it ignited a firestorm of outrage among pro-Israel activists and was probably the first time I’d ever paid any attention to her.

https://x.com/RealCandaceO/status/1724456541623886079?

Apparently around the same time, she began Tweeting out “Christ is king.” Although this was hardly a controversial affirmation for a devout Christian, that phrase hugely irritated Shapiro and other pro-Israel Jews, who soon denounced her as antisemitic, eventually leading to her termination. I’m only very slightly familiar with most of the social media personalities involved in that bitter controversy, but when I Googled the matter, this article from the New Republic came up, which seems to reasonably summarize the controversy.

Our very lightly moderated website tends to attract many commenters fiercely critical of Jews and Israel, so it was hardly surprising that she quickly became a great hero to some of these, who began praising and promoting her in the comments of one of my recent articles, thereby getting my attention. My cursory examination of her background—she majored in journalism at a pretty mediocre college then dropped out—left me rather unimpressed, leading to a few angry exchanges. But I subsequently discovered that some more serious individuals had also begun to admire her bold public positions, so I eventually decided to more carefully investigate them.

She generally produces new video podcasts every day or two, mostly interviews or monologues on various controversial subjects. With gigantic legal judgments having driven Alex Jones and his media empire into bankruptcy, I was told that she had now become one of the most popular promoters of conspiracies on the Internet. The reach of her YouTube channel certainly seemed to be growing very rapidly, now having more than 2.3 million subscribers, along with another 5.5 million Followers on Twitter, so her individual videos often get a half-million or a million views each.

These seem like very big numbers, a half-dozen times larger than those of Napolitano and all his distinguished guests. I think one of the biggest left-liberal channels on YouTube is Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, whose presence stretches back more than a dozen years, but Owens now has more subscribers.

Once I glanced at the titles of her more recent podcasts, I was much less surprised at her popularity. Many of these were her sometimes contentious interviews with other celebrities and influencers, notably including rap-star Kanye West, Alex Jones, and Russell Brand. Meanwhile, many of the monologues seemed to focus on Satanism, Hitler, 9/11 conspiracies, demonic agendas, transgenderism, Israel, and antisemitism. Such lurid, “exciting” topics naturally tend to attract a large audience, though perhaps not one of the highest intellectual quality, and I think the main reason more YouTubers don’t emphasize them is because those who do often get purged. So her popularity was actually less surprising to me than her survival on what had gradually become a tightly-censored platform.

I watched about a dozen of her videos to get a sense of the content she was releasing and perhaps also some clues to this mystery. Two of the most popular ones had been her first episodes explaining how she’d gotten fired, and the second of those segued into a confused mish-mash of claims involving the CIA’s MKUltra program, Satanism, Eugenics, Kanye West, the reality of demons, and Charles Manson having been “a Fed.” While I didn’t think that YouTube would purge anyone for making such statements, I also doubted they enhanced her credibility.

Since I don’t know or care anything about celebrity-rappers, I then focused on some of the subjects about which I had some reasonably good knowledge. Most of her videos run a half-hour or more, with the main topic taking up perhaps 10-15 minutes and the rest mostly consisting of filler, including celebrity scandals, shocking news stories, and advertisements. I watched Episodes 9 and 12 that discussed the 9/11 Attacks, and the embedded videos start at those segments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJj4TA9Stt4&t=85s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tucTJi2KqPk&t=366s

To my surprise, she provided some important factual information. For example, the first episode explained in considerable detail—backed by network news footage—how five Israeli Mossad agents had been caught red-handed celebrating the successful attacks on the World Trade Center and were then imprisoned and interrogated by the FBI for a couple of months. Despite supposedly failing numerous lie-detector tests, massive political pressure was brought to bear on their case and they were finally released and deported back to Israel uncharged.

Her follow-up episode recounted the equally bizarre story of how an allegedly intact hijacker passport was found on the ground near the burning World Trade Center towers, along with later news stories indicating that thousands of the Israelis working in the vicinity of the towers had allegedly been alerted by instant messages of the impending attacks an hour or two before they occurred, ensuring that almost none of them were killed in the huge disaster.

Now these items are certainly well-known to anyone who has spent any time looking into details of 9/11 but since they never appear in mainstream accounts, I’m sure they were entirely new to her youthful, celebrity-oriented audience. And although those items only cover about 2% of the strange aspects of the story, that’s 2% more than most Americans have never heard, especially in convenient YouTube videos that have been viewed well over a million times. I think most younger Americans rarely read anything longer than a Tweet, but for those who wish further information, it’s easily available on the Internet, including in a few of my own articles:

• American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 7, 2021 • 7,800 Words

Two more of her episodes, numbers 7 and 17, dealt with World War II and Hitler, and once again provided some very useful and important material, not the sort of thing normally encountered these days anywhere on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-_9so7OYU&t=80s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhLXcvxdIyw&t=1s

The horrific treatment of German civilians in the aftermath of the war was discussed, along with claims that most of the crimes allegedly committed by the Nazis weren’t really all that different from the crimes committed by the Allies both during and after the war. Again, all these facts are very well known to anyone who has looked into the subject or read the meticulously-documented books by longtime UN Human Rights official Dr. Alfred de Zayas, but little of this is probably often found these days on YouTube, let alone in videos with nearly a million views between them. There was even some mention of the Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s, another very touchy and carefully ignored subject.

Owens drew portions of her material from a excellent hour-long 2015 BBCDocumentary entitled 1945: The Savage Peace, which I’d never previously seen and that I’d now highly recommend:

https://rumble.com/embed/v5496jm/

Once again, her videos barely scraped the surface of the topic, but perhaps a portion of her audience might become curious enough to do additional research on the subjects by reading books or articles. It may or may not be a coincidence that the title of her first video—“Everything We Learned About World War 2 Is A Lie”—seems remarkably similar to that of my long 2023 piece on exactly the same subject, which together with its two sequels has been viewed a couple of hundred thousand times over the last year.

• American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 9, 2018 • 6,600 Words
• American Pravda: Jews and Nazis
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 6, 2018 • 6,800 Words
• Why Everything You Know About World War II Is Wrong
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 12, 2023 • 12,600 Words
• American Pravda: Understanding World War II
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2019 • 20,500 Words

Her discussions of the absurdities of today’s political climate and the way that ridiculous accusations of antisemitism are used to stifle debate was also very sensible and welcome. I was especially glad to see that she’d interviewed Briahna Joy Gray, recently fired by the Rising podcast of the Hill for being insufficiently respectful to pro-Israel propagandists, with that Owens video accurately entitled “Another Person Fired For Criticizing Israel?!” and viewed more than a half-million times.

Then just a week ago she had Tweeted out a note explaining that the notorious ADL had originally been founded with explicit mission of saving a Jewish criminal from his just punishment after he raped and murdered a 13-year-old girl, with that Tweet once again viewed more than a half-million times.

Since 2018 my own articles have revived and explained that important story at considerable length, and soon after the first of these appeared, the outstandingly-documented scholarly volume that I had used as the primary basis for my own analysis was suddenly purged from Amazon.

• American Pravda: The ADL in American Society
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 15, 2018 • 7,300 Words
• American Pravda: The Leo Frank Case and the Origins of the ADL
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 27, 2023 • 5,300 Words

Thus, notwithstanding the celebrity scandals and other nonsense that fill out those videos, on balance they all seemed very positive items to have in wide circulation, though I wondered a little how the ADL had allowed her to survive on YouTube as long as she had. Unfortunately, it’s quite possible that the answer to that question came in many of her other podcasts, which I viewed in a much more negative light.

A couple of years ago I’d published an article on some of the techniques used by the establishment to discredit its leading critics, especially those of a “conspiratorial” orientation. As I explained:

Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled “a conspiracy theorist.”

Transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are also usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the troubling lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in “cognitive infiltration.”

• American Pravda: Alex Jones, Cass Sunstein, and “Cognitive Infiltration”
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 8, 2022 • 5,400 Words

Thus, sometimes the easiest way to severely discredit “conspiracy-theorists” is to take full advantage of their psychological tendencies and lack of judgement, luring them into accepting and promoting utterly ridiculous things. Perhaps the wildly-popular QAnon movement of a few years ago had been manipulated along these lines.

Such this weaknesses seems very obvious in the case of Owens, certainly regarding her various videos on demons and the supernatural. It’s certainly true that one of America’s early rocket scientists was actively involved with the occult, but I don’t think that actually proves that our entire NASA space program was based upon Satanism. Similarly, just because some scientists have been mistaken doesn’t necessarily mean we should reject all of science as “a false religion,” and therefore become open to the possibility that the Earth is flat. Apparently, YouTube has for years been awash with numerous slick, well-produced videos purporting to prove that “the Earth is Flat,” and there are widespread suspicions that these have been released to lure gullible conspiracy-activists into making themselves look ridiculous and discrediting their entire community.

But I think the biggest problem of this type faced by Owens, likely to severely damage her credibility on everything else she promotes, has been her emphatic, repeated claims that Brigitte Macron—the First Lady of France—is actually a man.

When I first heard that claim floating around on the Internet, I naturally assumed it was just a joke. But it instead appears to be absolutely dead-serious, and in numerous videos over the last few months, Owens seems to have worked to make it into her signature issue, racking up several million views for her belief and apparently becoming its #1 worldwide promoter. One of her Tweets got 7.6 million views, and she later declared “I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man”:

SEE TWEET.

Given such forceful statements regarding a strange matter totally unknown to me, I watched several of Owens’ videos on the subject, wondering what shocking facts she had unearthed as proof of that extraordinary hypothesis. But I found almost nothing at all. The main item she emphasized was the claim there existed absolutely no record of the woman’s existence for the first thirty years prior to her alleged sex-change operation. Owens said she had originally discovered this theory in Britain’s notorious Daily Mail, but when I Googled that publication I came across various articlesmentioning that Mrs. Macron’s birth had been reported in a local French newspaper as had been her first marriage at the age of 22. Mrs. Macron has three adult children and one of them was quoted in the newspaper expressing total outrage at the lunatics who were claiming that their mother was actually a man.

I suspect that this absurdity may have its origins in American ideological influence. Over the years, ultra-fringe right-wingers in our own country have sometimes claimed that Michelle Obama—mother of two children—was actually a man, and their French counterparts, led by a professional clairvoyant, probably concluded that if Americans were convinced that Mrs. Obama was a man then the same might be true of Mrs. Macron as well.

Owens may now possibly rank as the highest-profile “conspiracy theorist” active on YouTube, with her videos on 9/11, World War II, and other hugely contentious topics getting more viewership than those of anyone else. But given how strongly Owens has tied herself to the Brigitte Macron theory and several others that are equally absurd, the ADL and its allies may have decided that she’s the ideal public foil to discredit the positions of their opponents, deploying their influence to ensure that she remains on YouTube.

Phil Donahue’s daytime talk show that ran from 1967 to 1996 and although I never watched it, I’ve recently been told that the intellectual quality was actually quite good, with Donahue providing a huge public platform to controversial guests from all points across the ideological spectrum. But perhaps partly for that reason, he may have made certain powerful people uncomfortable, and he was eventually replaced with competing shows by hosts such as Geraldo Rivera, Maury Povich, Sally Jessy Raphael, and Montel Williams, who instead focused on the lurid and the bizarre.

Unfortunately, YouTube may now be following a similar policy, carefully removing all the lengthy, brilliant public lectures by renowned historian David Irving while ensuring that the videos declaring that France’s First Lady is a man remain widely available.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/C9z1fCgUn5If/

Dissident circles frequently use the phrase “controlled opposition, reflecting Lenin’s alleged strategy of creating a fake opposition movement that he himself could control and manipulate. Having watched a number of Candace Owens’ videos, she seems entirely sincere and I doubt very much whether she represents any sort of “controlled opposition.” But I do think another relevant term might be “promoted opposition,” with the powerful establishment using its control over the media and major platforms to decide exactly which individuals will become its most prominent and visible public opponents. And perhaps the continuing survival and success of Candace Owens on YouTube might reflect that sort of decision.

https://www.unz.com/runz/youtube-censorship-and-the-curious-case-of-candace-owens/

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