The Purpose of Censorship Is to Control What People Think

That's pretty sinister

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
― United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

In addition to my belief in spreading truth as a means of spreading liberty and strengthening God’s kingdom, I have another reason for starting to write here: because of Alex Berenson.

In August, Alex was finally banned from Twitter after months of tweeting many long and in-depth threads of analysis covering everything that’s been happening with coronavirus. When he was banned, this was the specific tweet that the thought police said forced them to expel him.

It would have been extremely helpful for all of us if Twitter had bothered to explain which portion of the tweet contradicts anything that can be found on the CDC website. But Twitter skipped over that step and proceeded directly to banning him: because everything in the tweet reflects official statements from the CDC!

The problem we all face in the quest to understand what’s happening with the pandemic is that the number of people who are permitted to discuss it keeps shrinking, and it was already small at the beginning. As speech restrictions of have increased, fewer and fewer voices are being permitted to express any level of inquiry or criticism at all.

Around the time that Alex was banned, I also found myself banned, in my case from writing on Medium where I had a following nowhere near as large or influential as Alex. But there’s a certain cold comfort in knowing that another writer I admired had been banned around the same time, for saying many of the same things I had been saying myself.

Let’s Go!

Since he also already had a huge following on Substack, and since I was no longer able to write on that other platform, I figured I’d try my luck here. Consider my logic.

Alex has already been banned from Twitter for no apparent reason—certainly not for stating anything untrue, nor anything that deviates from well-known, public pronouncements from TPTB—but so far not banned from Substack. Substack also has a reputation as being a platform that is more-than-commonly welcoming to all forms of free expression, regardless of political outlook.

At the same time, it’s very clear that the Biden administration and its ever tightening relationship with big tech platforms will only lead to more censorship of Covid skepticism (and government criticism in general) as time goes by.

As many people have pointed out, if Psaki says that the White House is working directly with Facebook, that means that Facebook has de facto become the government in the context of limiting speech about the pandemic. So the tired argument that Facebook is a private company utterly fails here. If they’re enforcing federal demands around speech, they are an arm of the executive branch and must be held accountable to every American’s constitutional right to free speech. (Hint: nobody in Washington or at Facebook gives a damn about anyone’s free speech, nor do they care if the private company canard convinces you that the censorship is fair. They’ve abandoned any pretense of liberty now and are nakedly shutting down any speech they dislike.)

Tucker Carlson has recently asked the question, what is the purpose of censoring certain forms of speech? To which he has answered himself, the only purpose of doing that would be to control what people think. And indeed, that is precisely the goal of our rulers. The current censorship regime being imposed by the government, the media and big tech platforms amounts to a never-before-contemplated attack upon the public psyche. It’s the neutron bomb of psychological warfare.

I am highly skeptical that Alex Berenson will be allowed to keep writing here forever. I’m very grateful to see him here, and for the fact that he evidently has a new book covering the pandemic coming out in the fall. Even Amazon is allowing him to sell it there!

But in the present tech grid of censorship, it isn’t as if the various platforms operate as independent players. Whoever is banned on Twitter, is bound to be banned everywhere else eventually. (This ought to alert you to the vital need for subsidiarity and federal limits on market share with respect to communications platforms, or an application of common carrier laws for social media similar to those which constrain the business practices of public utilities.)

Our rulers are fond of telling you to go and start your own bank, or social media platform or content delivery network. But in practice, this is not something they actually want, nor is it something they’ll actually permit.

Here is what the whois lookup reveals when searching Substack.

Both Amazon and Cloudflare have frequently denied service to established customers and creators before for completely unknown reasons, depriving clients of untold income and social reach. Why would anyone assume that won’t happen anymore?

In the case of a writer like Alex, who has a longtime following of fans and many published books, it will be harder to ban him completely, but it can definitely be done. And in my case, someone virtually unknown, the effort to ban is trivial. The other primary difference is that I’m unlikely to attract the attention of the babysitters. As controlling as they are, they don’t actually have the resources available at this time to supervise every new blogger who hangs out a shingle all over the Internet.

On the other hand, my previous little blog, where I was only making regular posts for a few months, and never gaining more than a small number of weekly views, was able to draw the ire and the ban hammer of the Grand Wizards of Medium.

Clearly, the logic of who gets banned isn’t as simple as “it’s only the big people” or “big people have nothing to worry about.” There is more nuance (or maybe more randomness) behind these decisions.

If there’s any reasoning, it appears to work this way: the censors obviously would like to silence as much skepticism as possible, both in terms of cutting those with a large following off from their audiences, as well as in terms of preventing anyone new and edgy from getting big in the first place. At the same time, there is a certain amount of plausible deniability that has to be met before ejecting wrong thinkers. Why?

Because if someone with a giant platform who is otherwise assumed to be on the reservation with all of the standard globalist beliefs about gay marriage and global warming suddenly goes off script about Covid—which is pretty much what happened recently with the Nicki Minaj Twitter fiasco—suddenly banning that person is not a good look.

If Twitter had immediately banned Nicki last week when she started her big tweet storm about a male acquaintance of hers in Trinidad suffering a testicular injury as a result of getting a coronavirus vaccine, her gigantic following would have gone ballistic—and rightly so! I don’t say their reaction would be righteous only because I applaud Nicki’s tweets (although I definitely applaud them). I mostly say banning her would be bad because of how obvious the meaning would be: our rulers simply cannot handle the phenomenon of having anyone famous and influential asking inconvenient questions about what these vaccines are doing to people everywhere.

The rulers are in some ways forced to hedge their bets. And in Nicki’s case, they got way more than they bargained for. They certainly didn’t expect her to become so explicit about the social logic of what was happening to her. She didn’t just say she didn’t like being scolded. She went much further, spelling out the fact that talking heads in the Democratic party literally believe that black people have to do whatever they tell them to do without questioning it at all.

Nicki had previously tweeted a clip from Tucker Carlson where TC was praising her, so she had to clap back on this fake communist trying to steer her back on res.

FYI: Nicki is currently suspended by Twitter. Damn! What are her legions of fans going to do to redeem queen?

So for me, the decision to start blogging here is experimental. And I’m going to make the exact same prediction about this account that I made about the one I had on Medium. It’s a bet I find irresistible because for me it’s all upside, and no downside. I predict my account will be banned from Substack. Reason being: I intend to write about true things I know are happening, including inconvenient facts about Covid, the lies and medical misinformation coming from powerful leaders, and the brutal actions being inflicted by governments around the world against their own citizens in the name of virus law.

How is this a win-win prediction for me? Because if it doesn’t come true, I win, in the sense that I will witness the resumption of normal free speech I cherish. But if it does come true and I do get banned, I still win. How?

In this sense. Attacking speech or certain works of art tends to have the opposite effect from that its opponents intend. The more our rulers stomp upon us, the hotter the flames of protest flare up. Or as Thomas Jefferson phrased it memorably, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” The oligarchs can claim a pyrrhic victory here and there, and might even succeed in suppressing certain voices entirely. But when those rebels are knocked aside, invariably two more will rise in their places, like an inexorable hydra of free speech. And the present crop of imbeciles ruling us cannot hold a torch to Heracles.