From 9/11 to Domestic Threat Actors — Control Is the Goal

Via Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• The United States has been unique in its dedication to free speech, but that Constitutional right has been slowly eroded in the name of national security and protecting public health
• In 1950, Sen. Joseph McCarthy claimed to have proof of a communist spy ring within the U.S. State Department. The lesson from that time was the destructive power of accusation
• In 2017, an organization called Hamilton 68 claimed to have proof showing hundreds of Russian-affiliated Twitter accounts manipulated the U.S. election to get Trump into the White House. It turned out to be a complete hoax, but media never updated the public with that truth
• In 1948, the same year the CIA launched Project Mockingbird, the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act (aka the Smith-Mundt Act) became law, which forbade the U.S. government from pushing propaganda onto the U.S. population. President Barrack Obama repealed this law in 2013, thereby legalizing the propagandizing of Americans
• For propaganda to be truly successful, especially in the long term, you also need censorship, and in the U.S., this requires the undermining of free speech rights. The undermining of free speech took off at the end of 2016, when Obama signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which opened the door to an offensive information war against the public

In a March 28, 2023, article titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,”^1,2 Jacob Siegel, senior editor of Tablet magazine’s afternoon news digest, News and The Scroll, discusses the emergence of the “disinformation industrial complex,” which is the topic of his forthcoming book.

The United States has been unique in its dedication to free speech, but that Constitutional right is rapidly eroding in the name of national security and protecting public health.

Siegel traces the early days of the information war to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who in 1950 claimed to have proof of a communist spy ring within the U.S. State Department. Initially, he claimed to have the names of 205 communist spies. A day later, he revised it to 57. However, the inconsistency is not the point.

“The point was the power of the accusation,” Siegel says. “For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.”

Blacklists and Witch Hunts Return

By 2017, American liberals had seemingly forgotten that lesson, as mainstream media pundits accused Donald Trump of being a Manchurian candidate installed by Russia. An organization called Hamilton 68 claimed to have proof showing hundreds of Russian-affiliated Twitter accounts manipulated the U.S. election to get Trump into the White House.

As it turns out, none of these accusations were true and Hamilton 68 turned out to be a “high-level hoax.” Most of the accounts were Americans engaged in organic conversations, which Hamilton 68 arbitrarily described as “Russian scheming.” Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, even admitted the company had labeled “real people” — again, mostly Americans — as “Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.”

A key difference between the McCarthy and Hamilton 68 episodes was that journalists, U.S. intelligence agencies and Congressional members didn’t swallow McCarthy’s accusations without chewing. When the witch hunt against Trump took off, anyone who questioned the accusations was attacked as a co-conspirator.

Media even refused to report on the evidence proving that Hamilton 68 was a complete scam. The level of disinterest in the truth suggested that American liberalism “had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal,” Siegel writes.

Propaganda and Censorship — Two Sides of the Same Coin

Propaganda is as old as humanity itself, but the modern version of it can be traced back to 1948, when the CIA’s Office of Special Projects launched Operation Mockingbird, a clandestine CIA media infiltration campaign that involved bribing hundreds of journalists to publish fake stories at the CIA’s request.

The dismissal of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists as mentally unstable crackpots was one of the tactics invented by the CIA at this time. Its intent was (and still is) to marginalize and demoralize anyone who questions the fabricated narrative.

It’s quite telling that Operation Mockingbird was launched the same year the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act (aka the Smith-Mundt Act) became law, which forbade the U.S. government from pushing propaganda onto the U.S. population.

This anti-propaganda law was repealed in 2013 by then-President Barrack Obama. So, since July 2013, the U.S. government and CIA have been legally permitted to propagandize U.S. citizens. In addition to the simplification of global coordination of news by way of news agencies, this is yet another reason why propaganda has flourished and grown exponentially in recent years.

But for propaganda to be truly successful, especially in the long term, you also need censorship — a concept wildly opposed in the U.S. until recently — and censorship, at least in America, requires the undermining of free speech rights.

As noted by Siegel, the effort to undercut free speech really took off at the end of 2016, when Obama signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which opened the door to “an open-ended, offensive information war” against the general public.

Seemingly overnight, “misinformation” and “disinformation” were said to pose an urgent existential threat to national security, freedom, democracy and, later, to public health. We’re now told we must eliminate misinformation to preserve free speech, which is so twisted that no Constitutionally-literate person can make sense of it.

The Acceleration of Free Speech Elimination

By repealing the Smith-Mundt Act, and signing into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, Obama laid the legal groundwork for government control of speech in the U.S. Since then, a sprawling disinformation industrial complex has emerged, which seeks to control the internet and all information in it.

As described by Siegel, the U.S. national security infrastructure has now fused with social media platforms, which is where the information war is being fought. The national mobilization against disinformation has also been expanded from a whole-of-government approach to a whole-of-society approach.

In a 2018 document, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) calls for “leveraging expertise from across government, tech and marketing sectors, academia, and NGO’s.” “This is how the government-created ‘war against disinformation’ became the great moral crusade of its time,” Siegel writes.

Of course, media have also played a significant role in the “whole-of-society response” to disinformation, but they are “by far the weakest player in the counter-disinformation complex,” Seigel notes, adding:³

“The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.

It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows.

This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.

The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend.

By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against American citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations.

The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say. What we are seeing now, in the revelations exposing the inner workings of the state-corporate censorship regime, is only the end of the beginning.

The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule.

The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian [election] interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm — a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.”

Phase 2 of the Information War — Total Control

The COVID pandemic was a significant part of Phase 1 in the information war, although the war on public perception began years earlier. As noted by Siegel, the COVID phase was “marked by distinctively human displays of incompetence and brute-force intimidation.” Phase 2 will undoubtedly be carried out by artificial intelligence, now thoroughly trained to identify the greatest triggers of fear and panic, both on an individual and societal basis.

We can also expect censorship by algorithm. It will no longer be a game of whack-a-mole with humans tagging posts and requesting their removal. Instead, messages containing certain words simply won’t go anywhere and won’t be seen. Spoken and written key words will be automatically flagged and deleted or barred from posting by AI.

AI-based bots and “sock puppets” (fake accounts) can also be launched across platforms and be algorithmically amplified to alter the perceptions of billions in real time. We saw this trend emerging during the first round of COVID, where multiple accounts were posting the same “original” message, verbatim, at the same time.

As noted by Siegel, the end goal of all this information wrangling is control. Not partial control, but total. Over everything and everyone. This is also why we will never see a government authority admit they spread disinformation themselves, even though, technically, they’ve been guilty of such on numerous occasions over the last three years.

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