At a minimum, a government is a system of control over members of a political body—Max Weber defined it as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”—and that includes the power to levy and collect taxes and raise and maintain an army. You will notice the centrality of “control,” and its ancillary “power.” That alone should make any serious person start to think maybe something’s wrong.
Last year the fiftieth anniversary edition of my old SDS book was published, the classic history of the central organization and essential creative center of the New Left in the 1960’s.. I contributed a preface in which I pointed out that the kind of “warmed-over Marxist-Gramscianism that purported to be the Left” for most of the decades after that time was the form of “dried-out socialism and authoritarian government that SDS in its serious years would have rejected out of hand.” There was nowhere “any champion of participatory democracy and community empowerment so important to SDS and its allies, nowhere the rejection of authoritarian institutions and government complicity” that marked the New Left.
I go back to that era now because what the Left has become over these years, particularly with its adoption of feministic values and woke racialism, is a threat to become a quite dangerous power in this country since one of its followers has a good chance to become President this fall, and to govern under the direction of Barak Obama and Bernie Sanders and their ilk in the effort to put all the basic functions of the society under government control.
A few years ago I wrote a book about society without government, in which I began by saying that finding out about what’s bad about it is inherent in its definition, if you just think about it. At a minimum, a government is a system of control over members of a political body—Max Weber defined it as “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”—and that includes the power to levy and collect taxes and raise and maintain an army. You will notice the centrality of “control,” and its ancillary “power.” That alone should make any serious person start to think maybe something’s wrong.
I mean, did you know that it takes an illegal immigrant as much as an hour and a half to get a driver’s license and registration to vote in American elections at the DMV? It’s absolutely disgraceful —
NEW YORK, NY — Sources within several major media and news networks recently confirmed that most legacy mainstream media head editors are now “pretty worried” that the news of the latest Trump assassination attempt might distract from the plight of illegal immigrants around the country.
According to sources at the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and the Economist, newspaper higher-ups are absolutely terrified that giving space to covering something as routine and commonplace as the Trump assassination might distract from how terrible life for illegal immigrants in the US is.
“Quite frankly, this is really concerning,” said CNN host Jake Tapper. “Just think — if people start reading about how there was yet another ordinary assassination attempt on Donald Trump, they’ll forget about all of the hoopla and racist bigotry that illegal immigrants have to endure day after day! I mean, did you know that it takes an illegal immigrant as much as an hour and a half to get a driver’s license and registration to vote in American elections at the DMV? It’s absolutely disgraceful — it’s only a third as long as legal US citizens’ wait times!”
News chiefs in writers’ bullpens across the country have committed to rectifying the possible wrong by posting as much as they possibly can on illegal immigrants’ struggles due to white cisgender powerstructures and also by ignoring assassination attempts, as long as they’re just on Trump.
At publishing time, all major mainstream news sources had finally agreed to cover Trump’s assassination, as long as they could be assured that it would happen.
Two government entities subordinated to the State Department concluded, in writing, that Israel was blocking their humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, reported to Congress the opposite conclusion because he intended to deliver more military aid to Gaza.
The selected formulation is unfortunately not covering the real issue at hand.
U.S. law prohibits military aid to countries which are hindering U.S. humanitarian aid.
Two government entities subordinated to the State Department concluded, in writing, that Israel was blocking their humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, reported to Congress the opposite conclusion because he intended to deliver more military aid to Gaza.
By misleading Congress on humanitarian aid to Gaza Blinken deliberated broke the law.
The real issue is control and paranoia. The Australian government is again demonstrating that Australian citizens are its property. It has decided what they can consume, what they may be allowed to read or post, and can make the final say. Social media platforms must comply or they will be fined; how this is enforced is the next stage of overreach.
“Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy”– Communications Minister Michelle Rowland
The Australian government is looking to further control speech and information online, deciding what its citizens may consume through stricter social media laws. The proposal is that social media platforms will be fined 5% of their global revenue should undesired posts or information be seen by Australians. This in conjunction with a South Australian ban on children under fourteen from social media. Steps are being made by the Australian national government to set a standard for information isolation. This is not just an Australian problem but one that is becoming apparent in Canada and the United Kingdom as well. It is a cautionary tale to nations that boast about freedom.
The intention is to censor hateful and deceptive content. The internet has been full of that since the first online forums, so nothing new there. It has also been full of other forms of information and art which at certain times and places (and without context) would also be considered “unapproved.” The intention of the government is to gatekeep and police what it decides the citizens of Australia are allowed to consume or produce.
“Australians’ legitimately-held political beliefs should not be censored by either the government, or by foreign social media platform”– Opposition Home Affairs spokesperson James Patterson
A threat to democracy is the most common cited reason. Dissenting opinions which run contrary to permissible political ideologies or refute the notion of government itself are dangerous. They challenge the status quo and bring into question specific policies while exposing corruption. Instead of setting a better example, allowing transparency and running with consistency and efficiency, the response is to ban anything that presents a challenge. As such, the new bill is part of an Australian government crackdown to take control of the nation in regards to tech influence from foreign platforms.
The irony is that banning information adds an element of taboo and enhances paranoia. Those who already have a distrust of the state will lean into conspiracy theories or embrace rightfully repulsive persons or ideologies. Damn the nuance! Repulsiveness becomes appealing because in some way it is a snub to the status quo, which is hated and distrusted that much more than history’s pariahs.
It’s been the government that has betrayed people’s trust, not memes. Recall the constant lies and twists and turns from the Global War on Terror to the war on COVID. Other, less grand moments have also inspired challenges to a paranoid authority and its experts, who at different times made Pokemon Go, planking, fidget spinners and shirtless men on the Magic Mike poster all aspects of social concern to be policed, censored, or controlled. They’re now mostly forgotten, but were part of the culminating paternal arrogance of those who view themselves as your superiors.
Social media has continued to be a focus of censorship by various governments, and its still banned in some parts of the world. During the COVID years, those who sought alternative information found themselves in a place of controversy, while others were visited by the police for online posts. Information ranged from blatant lies to more subtle and complicated. The trouble is this went for corporate and state media agencies as well as meme accounts.
In 2023, the Australian government attempted to pass a bill that was criticized in Parliament for giving the governing authority too much power to determine what is permissible speech. The problem is in defining misinformation and disinformation. Social media is certainly rife with both, including the intentional spreading of lies, whether for ideological gain, clout, or for shitposting purposes. What someone does with this information is up to the discretion of the consumer. A person only needs to go to the comment section to find clarifications and explanations, or they could research further. For those who take a meme or spurious claim at face value, this in itself brings into question democracy; power is placed into the hands of individuals who can be swayed by memes. Are such memes any better or worse than the claims and “promises” of a politician? False claims and outright misinformation can be quite obvious to anyone who is not actively trying to feed their preconceived biases.
Social media platforms have been using community notes and self-policing to address the problems of bots and false claims. The trouble is that history itself is constantly being learned and studied, debated and reviewed by historians and amateurs in the field. Developments in cience are the subject of scrutiny and critical review and analysis. To have an authority determine the correct viewpoint leaves itself open to experts bias or outdated information.
In other words, it was with Hillary and the Democratic Party, and then with the Patriot Act under Bush jr, that the U.S. lost freedom of the press, privacy and freedom of opposition, opening the door to torture and mass surveillance, all of these policies backed by the “fight against terror”. 9/11 worked as a form of power legitimation through victimization.
To prevent this, the strategy is still and always based on demonizing and isolating Russia. The intercontinental connection between Europe, Asia and Africa must be prevented. Faced with the inability and impossibility of characterizing everything as “Kremlin propaganda” when the facts don’t fit the official narrative, Hillary is now proposing a new phase in mind control.
Hillary Clinton, in a tête a tête with Rachel Maddow (Rachel One-to-One program on MSNBC), who is herself the queen of Russophobic propagandists and the main mainstream propagator of the infamous “Russiagate”, defend the lift of criminal charges against Americans who spread Russian “disinformation”.
Hillary Clinton herself bears enormous responsibility for disinformation, it must be said, since it was in her personal circle that “Russiagate”, and a whole strategy of demonizing Russia with the aim of separating the EU from this Eurasian power, were projected. Although it wasn’t so transparent at the time, this strategy of accusing the Russian Federation of wanting to “interfere” in Western democracies – as if the U.S. wasn’t the monopolist power of “democratic” interventionism – already represented the result of what we can call the ideological political “new normal”: the “normal” in which the parties of the center unite into a single monolithic and cohesive mass of principles, values and objectives. At the time, the Democratic Party already represented Wall Street and the entire military-industrial complex, as did the most fervent neocons, who many people thought were only in the Republican Party.
The support from people like Dick Cheney, accompanied by the massive support of 238 neocons, former George W. Bush “staffers”, McCain and Mitt Romney, referring to Kamala Harris as the “savior of democracy”, clearly demonstrates the reach of the Democratic Party among the ruling class. Don’t be fooled, for these people, many of them genocidal of the worst kind, responsible for crimes like the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, responsible for eternal wars like the one in Afghanistan, it’s not about “saving democracy”! It’s about pursuing the plan to regain world hegemony. With everything that this recovery might mean. Trump, for now, is threatening this project by turning inwards. We’ll see what he does when he realizes that nothing, he can do, will stop the loss of U.S. dominance in the world.
If anyone is to blame for the escalation that is destroying the West, it is Hillary Clinton. During the reign of her husband (Bill Clinton), between saxophones and adultery, the Democratic Party not only sold out to Wall Street, starting a process in which, over time, it began to collect as many corporate donations (PACS) as the Republican Party, demonstrating the game played by most corporations on both boards. The truth of today is that the Democratic party collects individual donations from the most important billionaires, like Michael Bloomberg and many others. No longer is the Democratic Party a Worker’s party.
The role of the Democratic Party as an instrument of anti-democratic domination suddenly came to the fore during the Clinton era, as when, in 1996, it destroyed, through the Telecommunications Act, Roosevelt’s regulations about the media sector, which prevented what happened later and what we see today: the concentration of the mainstream media in a handful of large conglomerates that cartelize and create a common narrative. All under the banner of the “liberalization of media markets”, which wiped out the smaller operators, accused of having “local monopolies”. Deregulation ended with the domination of the media by half a dozen large conglomerates.
In other words, it was with Hillary and the Democratic Party, and then with the Patriot Act under Bush jr, that the U.S. lost freedom of the press, privacy and freedom of opposition, opening the door to torture and mass surveillance, all of these policies backed by the “fight against terror”. 9/11 worked as a form of power legitimation through victimization.
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