Todd Smith concerning freedom to travel in commentary

A Plague of Censorship:Authoritarianism’s on the March

By Todd Smith

September 28, 2024

Click-click go the jackboots, all down the Western Press. I would have written “fascism’s,” but fascism is really just a special variant—and especially virulent form— of authoritarianism. As the American election (or pre-selection) draws nearer, the waves of Censorship are gaining in intensity. Recently, especially on YouTube, “strikes” and outright cancellations have hit a number of independent media sites, including Mark Sleboda, DDGeopolitics, and Larry Johnson, just to name a few. Clearly, the absolutely bogus category of “medical misinformation” is not the reason for these de-platformings. Instead, the cause is political WrongThink, particularly as it pertains to Ukraine, Israel, and Ka-mala Heiress, the Wall Street and corporate media exalted candidate for the Oval Office.

This kind of Censorship activity has broken out all over the West, its Humpty-Dumpty Empire, and it didn’t just happen yesterday. For the sake of brevity, which Shakespeare’s Polonius assures us is the “soul of wit” in Hamlet, I will point to two cases I believe are quite illustrative of the Censorship paradigm we’re in: Alex Jones and the Lab-Leak Hypothesis.

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Somehow, someway, US Courts have ruled that Alex Jones owes $1 billion for his Sandy Hook massacre denialism, even though Jones did not even originate the claim, but merely parroted a talking point (aka, “conspiracy theory”) that clearly was then circulating amongst the vast audience supporting his media site InfoWars. Just to be clear: I’ve never been an Alex Jones fan; he’s a kind of loudmouth bullfrog (apparently has an aversion to Chobani brand yogurt) who’s actually quite amusing, in small samples, the way that anyone who can’t shut up but knows a few things can be. Think carnival barker, or snake oil salesman.

Anyway, and I think Matt Taibbi has written about this, the Big Tech takedown of Alex Jones’ platform in 2016 was an ominous harbinger of things to come. I wrote and spoke a piece on the Sandy Hook massacre (December 14, 2012) days after it happened; a Western culture saturated with Patriarchy and Misogyny struck me immediately as the relevant context for the unhinged and alienated lone gun kid’s motivation, his “state of mind.” I didn’t even realize until 4 years later that a “Sandy Hook Hoax” theory even existed. In other words: Alex Jones saying whatever he was saying about the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting most likely did not influence anyone outside of a bubble of people who were already convinced, for whatever unreason, that it was a hoax. However, Jones has been a consistent critic of the US Government on a range of issues, and this appears to be inescapably the criterion for said Government attempting to muzzle him (they failed, wink-wink). His platform’s suppression also happened during an election year fraught with oddities that led to one of the biggest conspiracy theories of all: Russiagate.

More recently, the Covid Regime promulgated the most intense censorship campaign in recent memory. I take the Lab Leak Hypothesis as a singular example of Government colluding with Big Tech to suppress any and all references to the possibility of a laboratory origin for the Virus. For at least 9 months during 2020, any mention of a Lab Leak origin on social media was considered a “violation of community standards” for no good reason whatsoever, except the imperious diktats of unelected Public Health officials who had no idea about the actual origin of the Virus. How democratic is that? In fact, as most readers know, any and all views deviating from the Dictated Consensus were explicitly banned under the bogus “misinformation” classification, even though, as we know now, they were completely full of shit. The Spirit of Science was totally violated under Covid—no doubt about that.

Independent media, and independent thought, critical thinking, are totally under attack in today’s new-fangled authoritarian regime structure. It’s a ramshackle affair, but there may be some shackles at the end of it for those of us who trip over the Censor’s wire. You don’t have to be an Alex Jones or Lab Leak Hypothesis fan to see what’s going on, to sort of quote Marvin Gaye…

The author graciously has granted this website permission to reprint selected essays & commentaries.

The views and/or opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of APS Radio News or of its affiliate, APS Radio.

This article appeared originaly at the author’s substack page.

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