The Censorship Industrial Complex

it's coming for you

It is nearly 63 years since the wise President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned America about a “military-industrial complex” thusly:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

But did you know that Ike had a little more to say on the subject of “unwarranted influence?”

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

What? You mean to say that scholars can be bought? Nooo!

Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

What? A “scientific-technological elite” whose power is “gravely to be regarded?”

So what Ike is saying that if, for example, the Federal government was spending trillions on climate change research the scientists in receipt of Federal funds would not be likely to go against the Narrative that climate change was the worst thing since sliced bread.

And if the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had financed gain-of-function research that ended up being performed at an institute in Wuhan, China, he might be a little slow to admit that his research might well have caused the recent COVID unpleasantness.

OK. So it’s not just the Defense Industrial Complex. But also the Medical Industrial Complex. And also the Climate Industrial Complex.

Now comes the Censorship Industrial Complex. According to Jeffrey A. Tucker there’s this private group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). It was “set up in 2018 to monitor and curate the internet.”

Let’s see: 2018? So that would just be in time to “curate” the mid-term elections.

CTIL was supposedly a private organization but it later came to work tightly with government agencies. Indeed, from its inception, the League included employees from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

You all know CISA. They are the august government scholars that get to define “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” Back to CTIL.

They were not just working with social media and mainstream media to craft narratives. They were engaged in so-called offensive work too, creating sock puppets to shout down dissidents and humiliate them, fabricating the appearance of a mainstream consensus. These efforts of CTIL began in earnest in 2018 in order to stop a “repeat of 2016;” that is to say, the election of Donald Trump. The ethos in the group was that Trump and his supporters, and any opinion they held on anything, represented a grave threat to state security and needed to be crushed.

And then of course, when COVID came along, the folks at CTIL were all practiced and organized to push the Narrative and censor any opposition. And not just COVID.

The White House and its agencies are working with such groups to suppress negative information about economic conditions.

Of course, governments and powerful people have been busy censoring and “curating” Narratives since the dawn of time. The point of the First Amendment is to make it a little difficult for governments to censor information. Although nothing can stop them from hurling pejoratives at people that fail to “toe the party line.” And as for “curating;” that’s what politicians and their operatives do every waking moment.