The battle to control America’s mind. By David Samuels.
“How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?” wondered Richard Holbrooke, the dean of the American Diplomatic Corps, in the aftermath of 9/11. What startled Holbrooke, and presumably many of the readers of his Washington Post editorial, wasn’t Osama bin Laden’s terror attacks themselves but rather the Al Qaeda chief’s ability to control the framing of those attacks without a state or a television station of his own.
To answer this new threat, Holbrooke called for a centralised authority run by the White House that would combine the powers of the State Department, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the CIA and other government agencies in order to impose America’s preferred interpretation of reality upon the world. …
Blowback:
The dream of controlling reality through semiotic and technical means remains current in Washington and other Western capitals, even as the battlefields of the Middle East have gone silent. What started out as a way to fight a far-away foe has quietly metastasised into a totalitarian fantasy of endless warfare against the erroneous thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens closer to home. …
A key turning point in transforming these tactics from a war-fighting technique to a new theory of Western governance happened quietly a decade ago, when large-scale spying on US citizens by the NSA was licensed by the Obama White House.
Documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden alerted the public to a series of domestic spying programmes, as well as the fact that the NSA was routinely mining social media platforms to build profiles on Americans without judicial review. While the NSA had previously been required to stop searching the contact chain of a foreign target when it reached a US citizen, a change in policy allowed intelligence services to continue tracing the online contacts of Americans so long as there was a “foreign intelligence” purpose to justify the snooping.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, hints of further centralised US government surveillance activities using private technology companies began to emerge. The Obama administration routinely spied on reporters by monitoring their private telephone records and using that information to issue subpoenas to force them to reveal their sources. …
Bin Laden -> Putin -> Trump -> You:
By identifying Trump as an extension of Putin, the Russiagate theory neatly transformed a foreign threat into a domestic one — thereby legitimising all-out warfare by the Washington establishment against a President that many believed to be a dangerous lunatic. …
Before leaving office, Obama ordered his spy chief John Brennan to draft an official assessment claiming that the Steele dossier was real — and that Putin had helped put Trump in the White House. Obama then signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, targeting Putin, and by extension Trump. …
Obama’s war on foreign propaganda and disinformation was founded on an outright lie that was kept alive for years by a pliant media addicted to taking handouts from nameless operatives who waged information warfare against their political enemies — and a majority of the country. …
Since “Russia” equalled Trump, stopping “Russian disinformation” meant censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the bureaucratic takeover of domestic communications infrastructure. …
The tech companies were forced to do their bidding:
The first was the threat to regulate digital monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The second was to label the technology companies that had supposedly been leveraged by Putin as national security threats. Both these tactics relied on the wording of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a law originally intended to punish the distribution of child pornography, which exempted Google and Facebook from libel and other claims for which publishers of newspapers, magazines and other editorial products remained liable — on the theory that tech platforms were not publishers.
Monopoly platforms such as Google and Facebook were now caught in a bind. Facing potentially ruinous regulation, and at risk of being labelled national security threats, the platforms were prohibited from engaging in editorial decision-making that would turn their shiny liability-free monopolies into ordinary publishing pumpkins under the terms of Section 230 of the CDA. What the technology companies needed, in other words, was an external authority that would make editorial decisions for them, on a basis that would be acceptable to Democrats and national security bureaucrats.
Enter the fact-checkers. … Between 2014 and June 2021, the number of fact-checking organisations in the US — employing mostly freelance workers with no particular qualifications or prior experience — rose from 44 to 341 …
In October of 2020, the new domestic information security complex showed its overt partisan political purpose by massively censoring news reports about the contents of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden while his father was running for the presidency. …
The Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content. …
Public confidence in the American press has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Only 16% of American adults in a recent Gallup poll expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the information they receive from newspapers, with 11% expressing similar levels of confidence in what they see on television. Among Republicans, the number expressing confidence in newspapers is 5%. This decline in confidence has no parallel in any other Western country.
Americans, it turned out, were no more susceptible to domestic information operations than Muslims were in the Middle East two decades earlier.
Now America, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, must face the challenge of how to govern a country in which trust has been comprehensively shattered, and all that is left is a landscape of endless information operations run by warring tribes who define their opponents as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists”.
None of these efforts to define reality seem likely to do much to promote social peace in the US, any more than they succeeded in bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East.
Wonderful. And it’s spreading throughout the West. It’s obviously succeeding for the left, as shown by recent dubious election results in the US. Do we now face a permanent dictatorship based on massive censorship, indoctrination through compulsory education, government largesse only for the politically obedient, and electoral shenanigans?
hat-tip Stephen Neil
