Journalists Love Nothing More Than Extreme Corporate Censorship
We’re in the midst of what is likely the most extreme corporate censorship crusade in modern history — whereby oligarchic tech officials have moved to simultaneously purge the sitting, democratically-elected President from all the internet’s most-used public communications platforms — and the reaction among media activists (a more apt term than “journalists”) is 100% predictable: complete jubilation.
They absolutely love corporate censorship, and their ecstasy at its implementation grows in direct proportion to how ruthless and politically vengeful that censorship is. These people have the foresight of a gnat: they are so consumed by an ideology of petty, vindictive victimhood that they have no capacity to see how such democracy-overruling censorship power poses an unprecedented threat to political speech and civil liberties.
This threat — the coming purge which will be effectuated by those in positions of authority who crave nothing more than to punish their allegedly fascist/white supremacist/MAGA enemies and thereby impose a left/liberal corporate authoritarian monoculture — in the long-run vastly outweighs whatever “threat” was posed by the farcical MAGA goofball intrusion at the Capitol on Wednesday. Which, again, was obviously not a “coup attempt” in any recognizable sense of that term. “MAGA Terrorist Insurrection,” the insane characterization put forth with a straight face on nationally-televised CNN broadcasts by Jake Tapper (to take just one of countless examples) is sheer propaganda — intentionally designed to foment fear and hysteria for profit. CNN enjoyed its highest ratings ever on Wednesday, and of course you can’t just let that go to waste.
It’s darkly hilarious to consider what the supposed “crisis” of those yahoos taking a mob joyride through the Capitol actually achieved, and whether it warrants such a drastic state and corporate crackdown. If they really thought they were going to help their God Emperor Trump triumphantly retain control of the Presidency, what happened was that they hastened his demise. Within about 24 hours, Trump was made to denounce his own pro-Trump mob, and then sheepishly conceded in humiliating fashion. Likewise, the mob’s reward will be not eternal glory, but prison.
In other words, the specter of “coup” or “insurrection,” which never existed in the first place, should now be dead and buried even for those with the wildest of imaginations. But the actual cessation of the purported “threat” is never going to be good enough for power-mad opportunists who are determined to exploit this fiasco for all it’s worth. Their brains are so addled by five years of nonstop Trump-induced mania, they will never be able to comprehend that the ramifications of this full-speed-ahead crackdown exceed by many orders of magnitude the ramifications of a few hours of mob stupidity at the Capitol.
Terminated in the ongoing purge is not just Trump himself, but figures regarded to even have been affiliated with him, such as Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, and Steve Bannon. In the case of Powell and Flynn, the rationale put forth by Twitter is that their accounts engaged in “behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm” — a formulation that almost sounds like it was intentionally crafted to evoke dystopian bureaucratic nightmare. Bannon’s YouTube was similarly nuked, and surely there’s more to come.
Preventing the risk of further “violence,” the justification claimed by Twitter for Trump’s expulsion from his primary communications outlet, is complete bullshit. There is no standardized or neutral way for these tech officials to evaluate the alleged risk of “harm” or “violence” posed by any given tweet. Not only are the concepts themselves infinitely malleable — I hereby declare myself “harmed” by the existence of Mehdi Hasan, please ban him — this conceptual malleability ensures that enforcement actions are deployed solely at the subjective whim of the enforcers. What these corporations have done is made a raw political calculation, one that happens to solidify their supra-national discursive dominance and positions them nicely as a new Democratic administration is about to come in.
This is coordinated corporate censorship of a historic magnitude — an attempt to destroy via public and private power any remnants of a political “movement” which has so enraged elite culture. If you were under the illusion that journalists would be a bulwark against such an ominous development, please know that they are its most ardent cheerleaders.
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