Fighting back against the Censorship-Industrial Complex
Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi invited me to a place with a better idea for humanity than the joyless acceptance of the dystopian current thing
Something exciting and extraordinary occurred in my very ordinary housewife-on-the-prairie life recently: I was invited to fight the Censorship-Industrial Complex. And by famous author, environmental activist, social critic, former candidate for governor, and Twitter Files journalist, Michael Shellenberger – well, one of his associates – no less. Let’s say that skillfully placing a reply on a Shellenberger Tweet, informing the audience that I had been the foremost reporter on the Twitter Files and subsequent Congress Hearing in the German-speaking world (for the evidence, see here[1]) did the trick. And knowing people, of course. In this case, the wonderful Alex Gutentag. Working at Public, Shellenberger’s NGO, she reached out and connected me to one of Matt Taibbi’s associates, the no less lovely Andrew Lowenthal, another Twitter Files reporter. I talked to Andrew and he convinced me, a person Covid restrictions destroyed travelling for, in an instance. It was settled: Shellenberger sponsored a trip to London, I came, I saw, didn’t sleep, and had a great, albeit intense time.
Shellenberger’s idea to get an international bunch of reporters, journalists, writers, editors, politicians, comedians, satirists, and commentators together to understand what the f—happened to free speech over the last three years globally, and how to fight it, had been a desideratum to any rational thinking being for a long time. In London’s City of Westminster, it was realized on the spot. It was a private event (invite only) and the main thing I flew down to London for.
But the cherry on top that really made me overcome my excruciating hatred of travelling and fear of flying was a major event for the public that preceded the event on the night before (admitting I had been excited about this one just as much). In a much anticipated night announced as The Censorship-Industrial Complex Exposed!, every dissident’s (i.e. sane person’s) darling Russell Brand hosted an event that the satirist Francis Foster – the somewhat more entertaining half of Triggernometry – introduced to the 1500-strong audience (thanks, Daniel) as an “international meeting of the alt-Right.” Wait, you don’t know what the alt-Right is? “The alt-Right, that’s Labour-voters who still believe in free speech.” Cockney accent and all. Lighten up leftists, it’s just your old buddies taking the piss.
Russell Brand, pulling off the Dandy hippie look we love and matched it with the whitest pair of sneakers I have ever seen, took centre stage, flanked by Michael Shellenberger to the left and Matt Taibbi to the right. But it was Michael who took the spotlight: “Some people say that the Censorship-Industrial Complex does not exist.” Boo to them. It’s not as though FBI agents boasting in emails about having killed 20 million Tweets for, among other things, private citizens telling their stories about serious mRNA vaccine side effects or “flagging” them as “mis-/mal-/or disinformation” has anything to do with censorship, right. Right? Or having the New York Post’s account suspended on October 14th, 2020, incidentally the day Hunter Biden’s Laptop demonstrating documents of his mafia deals with the Ukraine and China were the breaking story. Nothing to do with censorship. Nothing to see here.
But we all know this, and so did the audience that night. Enjoying the whistling and applause and Russell’s populist flamboyance, I sat on the balcony and would have matchstick applied to my eyes just not to miss anything. While Michael, intelligent, statesman-like, and with a better body posture than my (great) yoga teacher, represented the pragmatic and not seldom optimistic side of things to Russell’s questions, Matt, in a similarly good mood, if still jet-lagged, was the true philosopher of the evening. Matt was wearing his famous dark suit, the one we remember from the Congress hearing (maybe it’s a different suit, but to me they looked the same). When people you genuinely admire for their casualness, their humility, their deliberate understatement of how they appear in public suddenly “dress up” for their audience, you can’t help but love them even more – especially if a certain, but endearing clumsiness surrounds the result. And that was the case with Matt. Lanky Russell made sure Matt’s glass was always filled with water, this is how much he became protective of him. And Matt’s disclaimers as how he thought the speech he had rewritten on the plane was no longer good, somehow didn’t work as disclaimers, because we knew he’d deliver. And that’s what he did:
“Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that concerns people from all countries. Last year, he and I were offered a unique opportunity to look at the internal documentation of Twitter. I entered that story lugging old-fashioned, legalistic, American views about rights, hoping to answer maybe one or two questions. Had the FBI, for instance, ever told the company what to do in a key speech episode? If so, that would be a First Amendment violation. Big stuff!
But after looking at thousands of emails and Slack chats, I first started to get a headache, then became confused. I realized the old-school Enlightenment-era protections I grew up revering were designed to counter authoritarianism as people understood the concept hundreds of years ago, back in the days of tri-cornered hats and streets lined with horse manure.
What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.” [2]
And what Matt did next was nothing short of bonding with me (without him knowing it, of course, but I told him the next day). He addressed what in my own writings I considered to be the key factor in this unprecedented social trauma – this state crime – of Covid measures and the censorship regime around it: the destruction of our very own cognitive map, the one thing that makes us human, exemplified to the point in George Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty Four: first, the Binary principle, which destroys the richness of language and subtly conditions us to accept the governing narrative (there is no warm and cold, just warm and unwarm – there is no censorship, only anti-disinformation). And second, Doublethink, which is the state of mind in which you hold two contradictory propositions at the same time.[3] For example, “Follow the Science” when it comes to Covid and Climate change, but not when talking about biological sex. Or “no one’s said the vaccines stop transmission” and “the vaccines are safe and effective”. Matt’s example of the Nord Stream bombing as an example for Doublethink was less pertinent: first they said it was the Russians, now they say it was the Ukrainians. Doublethink is about holding two contradictory views simultaneously – and we had plenty of that during Covid (think of Fauci’s undying: “we see a lot of vaccination breakthroughs and people catching infections…that’s why make sure this Christmas to spend your time with the vaccinated!”).
Matt’s presentation was heart-warming, simply because he is a heartthrob. His appeal to build a counterculture against the regime from the bottom up felt sincere, and, as a former editor of Rolling Stone, he certainly knew what he was talking about. The censors do not give us anything enjoyable in return for “protecting us against harmful speech”: they give us fear, a constant suspicion of our fellow humans as despicable Nazis, denial, a culture of renunciation and a joyless, robotic acceptance of the dystopian current thing. They are humorless on top of it all. Laugh at your own peril. From the Twitter Files we know that Stanford University’s Virality Project, for instance, made sure that jokes were considered harmful content: calling the director of the NIH “Fauxi”, for example. Indeed – and I will write about it more extensively elsewhere – our Climate change/Covid panic culture of renunciation has taken away all that makes life worth living, starting with one’s individual, even crazy, self-expression, anything that could be seen as interesting in an individual, and ending with our ability to organise our own lives in a self-determined way. We are indeed seeing the abolition of the last remnants of the civil subject.
But the counter-enlightenment, this New Dark Middle Age of the zealous priests of woke and the bio-surveillance state in the name of “protecting vulnerable people” by stripping away their self-determination and therefore hurting them, this Doublethink-paradigm of the new elite class of vultures ripping apart a culture that brings joy and excitement to our lives, will not prevail. Or, not for longer than it takes for it to enter the private lives of everyone. For what we are confronting is not just another abstract political idea. It is concerning every one of us - every day, everywhere. Once they knock on your door, you will know it, too.
Cover: Video still of Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” (1987) (Ha ha, no it’s me. Actually.)
[1] https://www.achgut.com/artikel/der_zensur_komplex_und_die_schande_der_us_demokraten
[3] Matt “bonded with me” intellectually because I wrote extensively of Doublethink in this time, first in Der Erreger, then in Die Achse des Guten, and now a chapter on Doublethink called The Return of Doublethink – How George Orwell’s Dystopia became the cue for Covid-19 Ideology and the Left’s Power Grab for an edited collection I’m doing with Geoff Shullenberger (not Shellenberger). See https://www.achgut.com/artikel/die_rueckkehr_desdoublethink.