Pissed about the election? Blame censorship and propaganda
These twin monsters are the reason smart people keep getting gut-punched by reality.
I have a vivid memory of when I realized that virtually every piece of information I heard from “mainstream media” was a lie. It was in May of 2020. I was driving back to Boston from our place in New Hampshire. Listening to NPR as I had in virtually every car ride since I was a child, I heard them discussing coronavirus cases and mortality. As I listened, I heard someone speaking who certainly knew the right questions to ask, the context that would have defined the gray areas, the data even then available that could have allayed fears. Instead of doing these things, I listened as they scrupulously avoided doing any of that. I was so furious I started yelling (to myself) “They’re lying! They’re lying!”
Since March of 2020, I had been scouring all aspects of coronavirus data, reading every new article on PubMed, trying to understand my own risks, and those of my family. By April, it had become clear that something wasn’t right with the flow of information, that obvious scientific next-steps weren’t being taken (or published). By May, it was clear that the way the media was presenting the information, regardless of extant science, was geared towards spreading panic in service of various policy prescriptions, not towards helping people to understand the situation. But not till this drive did the scope become clear to me.
I wasn’t some “crazy Trumper.” Like many in 2016, I was absolutely gob-smacked when Trump won. It’s totally possible I cried. In March of 2020, I was so disgusted with Trump’s Covid press conferences, I changed my registration back to Democrat, and voted for Biden in the democrat primary.
But on that day in May, driving down I-95 in my red Tacoma, a flip switched in me as violently as I switched off the radio. This time, I was able to recognize every lie and every manipulation for what it was. As I fumed, I began to wonder. “What else are they lying about?… Trump?!” I mulled it over for a while, realizing that all of the information I got about him was served to me, and always with a healthy side of disdain—none of it primary sources. Then I remembered “grab ‘em by the pussy.” Nope, Trump was still bad. But then to play Devil’s advocate I asked myself, “what about Bill Clinton?” hmm…
When I got back, I canceled all of my subscriptions, changed my registration back to Republican, and signed up to volunteer for the only Republican campaign I could find—a total nut-job, but hey, it was Massachusetts.
I relay this anecdote because I think this week there are probably a reasonable number of people asking themselves why they keep getting politically whip-sawed—particularly after the yanking of “sharp as a tack” Joe, and the voteless installation of Kamala. There are probably even some who find themselves, as I was in that truck four years ago, asking how much of what they’ve been told for the last 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, 100 years ???, is a lie.
From 2018
I believe the short answer is basically “most of it.” I have no idea when it started—certainly by the War in Iraq—but beyond that, who knows. In my diagnosis, it is censorship that enables these lies, and that censorship is the reason that tens of millions of very well-educated people keep getting bitch-slapped by reality. I have come to view censorship as the primary author, not just of the Covid catastrophe, but of the rancor that attends and divides us on virtually every issue. If you stay with me for a bit, I will try to both explain and back up these statements.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
After we, the “Legion of Randos on Twitter” beat “The Experts TM” in the great battle of Covid, I started to try to understand what had made the debacle of 2020-2022 possible. I always read a lot, but I shifted what I read to history and philosophy as hopefully better keys to the riddle—histories of the rise of totalitarian regimes, both communist and fascist—marxist philosophy, postmodern philosophy, feminist philosophy, contemporary history. Anything to try and understand how the vast majority of the people in our country had participated in—and heartily supported—what was a fairly obvious—and wildly harmful—lie. During that period, details about the nature of our own particular debacle started to come out—Fauci’s cover-up of what he clearly viewed as a likely lab-leak, and his demonization of everyone who dared to question him; Fauci’s coordinated attack on the Great Barrington Declaration; the American Federation of Teachers’ role in keeping schools closed, and children masked; the Hunter Biden laptop, and on, and on.
Propaganda is bad, but it is censorship that destroys a society, censorship that paves the way for atrocities. Propaganda without a vigorous censorship component is fairly weak sauce. Whatever precept it propounds can be debated, de-bunked or simply mocked (or memed) into oblivion. But when propaganda is backed up by censorship, it can easily out-shine the truth. Because then propaganda finds itself in possession of a robust and stealthy defense that the naked truth lacks.
This last fact, that censorship is stealthy, is what makes it so toxic—especially in a liberal democracy with nearly absolute freedom of speech as its bedrock principle.
Why? Because in a society that values free speech so highly, abrogating that freedom requires a very compelling justification. Indeed, we don’t even censor literal nazis. The reason for defending the nazi’s right to utter intolerable speech, is that failure to do so allows would-be censors to label as “intolerable” all speech criticizing those in power. You either defend the nazi’s right to speak, or you have an explosion of government-designated nazis to as the censors’ swathe inexorably widens.
This is how censorship causes division. To get dispensation for the civically heinous act of violating a person’s first amendment rights, the aspiring censor must claim that the would-be target is hateful in whatever degree is required. Thus do attempts to stop “hate speech” result in a metastatic explosion of hate. Under the guise of curtailing hate, would-be censors gin-up hate against their targets by linking them to state-designated hate groups—misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, climate-deniers, conspiracy theorists, whatever the moral panic du jour might be. Designating the targets as a kind of anti-mascot allows the would-be censors to call for their censorship. By placing them beyond the pale, the censors’ targets’ rights to free speech may be constrained. The censors make it clear that even those who would repeat or even hear the claims of the censored are complicit. Thus do the victims find few defenders, as would-be defenders stand aside, and most refrain from even hearing the targets’ arguments, fearful of contamination even from such an intellectual distance. This is the process that the censors use to narrow the aperture of acceptable dialogue, constraining it to only those avenues and outlets that refrain from criticism, and repeating the smears of the censored in the friendly outlets. A friend of mine, Theo Jordan has aptly named this “hatecraft.”
And boy does hatecraft work. Social media and traditional media are aflame today with people who are genuinely afraid of their fellow citizens, believing them to be all of the the things the media has labeled them. They truly fear, and honestly loathe, those of their countrymen who voted for Donald Trump. Below is just one example from the top of my X feed. The post is from a friend of mine—a democrat till COVID—who wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, explaining her rationale for voting for Donald Trump. The author of the email quoted below is apparently a semi-famous actor from the show Twilight, who used his own name and personal email address to send this filth.
The man who wrote this is to be pitied, having been blinded by institutionally-sponsored and sanctioned hate. This hate has been deliberately engendered by our media, our government, and the institutions that run cover for it. Could this happen to you, could it have happened to you? It happened to me (I mean, not that bad; but still).
In 2016, I remember learning that the caretaker for our home in New Hampshire was voting Trump. Once I was out of his presence, I flew into a rage. Then I stopped myself. I knew he was a good man—a very, very good man. I knew that whatever was motivating his vote was not hate, because he didn’t have a hateful bone in his body. While I still did not vote for Trump in 2016, I became deeply skeptical of the narrative around Trump’s voters, and never used an -ist to describe them again.
If you have been tempted to justify other people’s votes for Trump as motivated by any of the usual -isms, to think that the black and latino men who supported him are the colored faces of white supremacy, or motivated by misogyny, that women voted for Trump because they were cowed by their husbands, or that Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan or Elon Musk are evil people (even though you likely loved some or all of them a few years back), I would suggest that you, too, have been at least somewhat blinded by this whole-of-society propaganda and censorship operation—by the state-sponsored hatecraft. It is a gross subversion of your liberty to be fully-informed, about which you have every reason to be furious.
Let me reiterate: YOUR rights were violated by government censorship—even if you were not censored. This wide-ranging censorship has caused YOU harm. Not because your voice was not heard, but because you were robbed of the opportunity to hear the dissenting voices of others, and to better understand—and counter, if possible—their reasons. If you were blind-sided by the results of this election, it is this theft that is to blame.
Censorship harms everyone: its targets it mutes, but its real victims are those whom it blinds and deafens. Censorship leaves them constantly off balance, lashing out at ill-defined phantoms in the funhouse mirror of its distorted reality, rather than at the censors who have blinded them.
Censorship brought us Trump. No matter what the media wants to claim, the reason people like me voted for Trump (in 2016 and 2020, too, not just in 2024) wasn’t because of some inherent degeneracy, but rather because of our fury over the policies and cultural insanity of the last four years and beyond. Criticism of those policies and positions was muted by censorship and marginalized by hatecraft. This allowed these policies and positions to find their way into law and culture unrefined by the chisel of debate, manifesting in their crudest and most barbaric forms. Russiagate, lockdowns, extended school closures, zoom school, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, open borders, fake-infrastructure-fueled inflation, woke supremacy, the trans stuff, the censorship industrial complex itself: none of these policies or cultural fads would have survived open debate. Had they been thrown aside, or at a minimum implemented in less monstrous forms after criticism reined them in, the fury that brought Trump to office would have been dampened—likely the few percentage points needed to deprive him of a second term. (And so, ironically, I find myself somewhat glad that they went so full-bore, but that is for another post).
If perhaps, as a Democrat voter, you don’t believe that you were personally harmed by any of the policies or narratives I mentioned above, let me suggest another which might resonate better. As a Democrat voter hoping for a Democrat president (any Democrat president, I presume) rather than Trump, you were harmed by the censorship and propaganda that propped up Joe Biden, both that which claimed his fitness for office in 2020 and 2024, and that which muted the many valid criticisms of his policies. The same mix of propaganda and censorship propped up Kamala, and lead you to believe that she would win the election. It is no stretch to say that censorship brought you Donald Trump. In its absence you would have had better candidates and better policies.
Both the run-up to president Biden’s election, and the period of his governance are marked by glaring examples of the typical censorship/propaganda cycle:
Censor
Limit discussion and propagation of criticisms and ideas. (Only illegal if done by the government).
Demonize
Demonize critics under the banner of some popular smear (right wing, hate speech), thus permitting censorship of the targets, and marking as off-limits any venue which would platform the demonized and censored. (Not illegal, just distasteful).
Propagandize
Manufacture a counter narrative which has undergone credibility-laundering, attaching the credibility of trusted institutions and people to prop up the lie, and shutdown debate. (Only illegal if done by the government).
The cycle works in this direction when trying to discredit some criticism or story harmful to the preferred narrative. When trying to shape the preferred narrative, it works in reverse order.
In future posts I will walk through many of the other examples noted above, and demonstrate how this cycle manifested in each.
But before I walk through some of the many tactics that were applied during the 2020 election, let’s remember where it ended, and how valid criticism (as if there were any other kind) was throttled by another whole-of-society propaganda operation.
THE ELEVATION OF BIDEN
In 2020, Joe Biden was brought to power on a litter of lies supported by the media, government bureaucracies and state-funded NGOs. He was held aloft by suppression of criticism and demonization of his critics.
At this point, there are now countless examples of the campaign and the government pressuring social media companies to remove true content that was damaging to Joe Biden’s candidacy. Some examples, like the one below, are more egregious, systemic and manipulative than others.
Reporting by Matt Orfalea unearthed a video of Rob Flaherty (currently in the Biden administration) describing how during the campaign it reached out to platforms and flagged as “misinformation” for removal, various posts discussing corruption, Biden’s mental fitness, or his record on the crime bill (all true information, or at a minimum open to debate.) Clicking on the image below will take you to the video where he discusses this—you owe it to yourself to click.
Removal was only the first step, the next was essentially “target rehabilitation.” One of Flaherty’s co-workers describes how after people were exposed to “disinformation” such as questions around Biden’s mental fitness (which they had flagged for facebook and twitter for removal), they micro-targeted the users who were exposed prior to the posts’ removal in order to provide counter-balancing content to “fix” the accurate perception they received from the “misinformation” they were exposed to. They did this using psychographic targeting, behavioral cues and other techniques used by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign to influence voters. Again, please click and watch—this was directed at YOU.
It is worth noting that these actions, while distasteful, are not illegal, with the exception perhaps of pressuring the platforms to remove the content. What’s more, in a normal information milieu, they are not even particularly harmful. The actions described above could only have effectively changed the narrative in a society stuck in the censorious stew from which we are only slowly extracting ourselves. For these tactics to work, it requires that the media to fail to do their job, not investigating or engaging with these criticisms, and looking the other way when stories are suppressed. It also requires a public that, through fear of being tarred with the demonizers’ brush, will not engage with information presented on demonized channels. Always, to be effective, propaganda and counter propaganda required both censorship (removal from the platforms), and demonization (labeling those who levy or publish the criticisms as outside the bounds of “polite society”).
Further, these actions did not take place in a vacuum. They took place at a time when the Election Integrity Project (detailed below) and other “public-private partnerships” were putting pressure on these platforms both to remove content, and to pressure them to change their terms of service. As a result, these requests to remove content were surrounded with a penumbra of coercion.
All of these things were occurring virtually simultaneously with the wholesale censorship of the “Hunter Biden Laptop” story.
The laptop story perfectly embodies the Propaganda/Censorship Cycle:
Censor as an information firebreak.
Demonize to close the information aperture: All those sharing are participating in Russian efforts to destabilize our elections, and must not be listened to nor platformed.
Propagandize with counter narrative: 50 Former Intelligence Officials Claim Laptop is Russian Disinformation
Step 1: Censor
On October 14th, 2020, the NY Post broke the story about the laptop, containing emails that provided compelling evidence of Biden’s influence peddling and potential kickbacks. Within hours of publication, the Post’s Twitter account was locked, and sharing across Facebook, Twitter and other platforms was completely blocked, not even allowing the sharing of the link through direct messages.
The companies acted so swiftly because they had effectively been pre-propagandized. The week prior to the release of the story, the FBI had informed the platforms to be on the look-out for a Russian hack-and-leak operation related to Hunter.
This is the despite (or because of?) the fact that the FBI knew the hard drive was real, because they had been notified of it in 2019 by the owner of store, subpoena’ed it, took possession and indeed had the original with which they could have easily corroborated it. Instead, they did the opposite.
The platforms had been even more thoroughly pre-propagandized weeks earlier, with multiple executives at Twitter and Facebook, as well as various other media and NGO's attending a“tabletop exercise” at the Aspen Institute, gaming out an 11-day “hack-and-dump” scenario relating to Hunter Biden. Source, Michael Shellenberger, Twitter Files Part 7. The scenario presented at this event, and uncovered through the Twitter Files is below, and is uncannily similar to what was actually released only a few weeks later—and subsequently censored, by people who participated in this very event (and then joked privately about how close it was to this exercise).
Demonize.
Having been so thoroughly prepared to doubt their lying eyes, the media, including social media platforms had no problem claiming they were censoring the story due concerns about veracity, and accusing those who were trying to share it of being Russian assets. This despite the FBI having confirmed to Twitter on the day of the release that the contents of the hard drive were in fact authentic.
Propagandize.
Within a week, a letter was organized by 50 former intelligence officials to cast doubt on the authenticity of the laptop, claiming it “had all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.” The FBI chose to stay mute during this, as did the many media attendees of the Aspen Institute’s now wildly fishy “table top exercise.” The effect was to codify the socially acceptable talking points, and ensure that those who dared discuss the laptop further were targeted with hatecraft, receiving the “Russian asset” label. All of this allowed Biden to brush the allegations off during the debate, and—once again—to falsely label Trump a “Russian Asset.” It allowed the moderators to back Biden up, without losing all credibility, as they reiterated the “consensus view” that it was “Russian Disinformation.”
Perhaps even more shocking, the false letter from “the 50 former” appears to have been engineered by Anthony Blinken, currently Secretary of State to President Biden. (Blinken denies this). From former acting-CIA Director Morell :
In private sworn testimony, Morell told the House Judiciary Committee that Antony Blinken, now secretary of state, was the senior campaign official who reached out to him “on or before” Oct. 17, 2020, three days after The Post published an email from the laptop suggesting Hunter had introduced his Ukrainian business partner to his father, then-Vice President Biden.
The collusion to misinform by our government and our media seems to know no bounds. And yet somehow, there is always another foul frontier to find.
During this same period, the “Election Integrity Project” (EIP) was actively engaged in flagging and recommending that social media platforms remove posts for “mis-” and “dis-information.” From Michael Shellenberger’s Public News:
The media has run cover on this, attempting to claim that a) the government was not the actual entity requesting that the content be removed, and b) the requests were just suggestions, not coercive. Yet many of the tickets created to monitor and manage these requests were created by the non-profit Center for Internet Security, CIS, which receives funding from CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—a government agency. Additionally, many of the emails show that CISA is CC’d, effectively telling the platforms that “big brother”, the guardian of the nation’s “cognitive infrastructure,” is indeed watching—and weighing your Section-230 protections in the balance.
This arrangement is explicitly prohibited by the supreme court. Again, from Public News:
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is “axiomatic” that the US government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
Thus, these actions are a violation of the first amendment. Nonetheless, Alex Stamos, the director of the EIP talks about how they [the EIP] “fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally. Here he describes explicitly how the EIP acts as a glove to keep the government’s actions free from its censorious fingerprints—exactly as the supreme court has indicated they may not do.
Source, Racket news.
Do you feel manipulated? Those who would answer that they don’t care, Trump was so bad that the manipulation was worth it, have given permission to future and worse manipulation, and ceded their personal sovereignty to unknown entities whose motivation—because of their total opacity—cannot possibly be understood (if you have special insight, please share in the comments below!) Given how deceptive these entities have proven to be, and how badly their policy prescriptions have played out, we all owe it to ourselves to hold accountable those actors we can identify. Turn off the radio, turn off the TV. It’s time we take back our personal sovereignty, widen our information apertures, and tune out the hatecraft.
Epilogue
These actions were all taken prior to the 2020 election, prior to Biden coming to power. It should surprise no one that once in power, these efforts to alter reality ramped up considerably. I will leave the details of those shenanigans for future posts, and leave you with two final morsels.
The first is the alacrity (weeks after the inauguration!) with which this group got the old gang together to resume and enhance their censorship-by-proxy activities—this time with a focus on COVID and vaccine misinformation, reconstituting the EIP as the Virality Project. From reporting by Andrew Lowenthal, Network Affects here.
And lastly, a deep-dive describing and depicting the scope and interconnectedness of this vast censorship and propaganda apparatus.
But remember, it’s all a conspiracy theory…
Source and details, Racket News.
Further Suggested Reading and Reporting.
Judiciary committee’s report on Biden Whitehouse Censorship with many primary sources, including unredacted emails.
House Committee on Weaponization of Government Report
Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi. Reporting and primary sources from investigations into the Twitter Files.
The Orf Report Matt Orfalea. A variety of censored media, including various video montages
Public News, Michael Shellenberger, et al
Network Affects, Andrew Lowenthal
The Free Press, Bari Weiss et al
Human Flourishing Aaron Kheriaty, private plaintiff in Murthy vs. Missouri censorship case headed back to the supreme court.
The Brownstone Institute Censorship Working Group
Thanks, yeah, I didn’t realize that I started a book :)
Love it! The absolute best thing to come out of the covid years is this massive political re-alignment centered around first principles. I would love for Democrats to re-assert their desire to protect free speech - and not just when they're out of the White House. I certainly don't like my free speech rights hinging on the intestinal fortitude of Republicans.