Government Coverups and Censorship Are the Problem

“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”—Hannah Arendt

In a perfect example of the Nanny State mindset at work, Hillary Clinton insists that the powers-that-be need “total control” in order to make the internet a safer place for users and protect us harm.

Clinton is not alone in her distaste for unregulated, free speech online.

A bipartisan chorus that includes both presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has long clamored to weaken or do away with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially acts as a bulwark against online censorship.

It’s a complicated legal issue that involves debates over immunity, liability, net neutrality and whether or not internet sites are publishers with editorial responsibility for the content posted to their sites, but really, it comes down to the tug-of-war over where censorship (corporate and government) begins and free speech ends.

As Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes for Reason, “What both the right and left attacks on the provision share is a willingness to use whatever excuses resonate—saving children, stopping bias, preventing terrorism, misogyny, and religious intolerance—to ensure more centralized control of online speech. They may couch these in partisan terms that play well with their respective bases, but their aim is essentially the same.”

In other words, the government will use any excuse to suppress dissent and control the narrative.

The internet may well be the final frontier where free speech still flourishes, especially for politically incorrect speech and disinformation, which test the limits of our so-called egalitarian commitment to the First Amendment’s broad-minded principles.

On the internet, falsehoods and lies abound, misdirection and misinformation dominate, and conspiracy theories go viral.

This is to be expected, and the response should be more speech, not less.

As Justice Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Yet to the government, these forms of “disinformation” rank right up there with terrorism, drugs, violence, and disease: societal evils so threatening that “we the people” should be willing to relinquish a little of our freedoms for the sake of national security.

Of course, it never works out that way.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, the war on COVID-19: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns only to become weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands.

Indeed, in the face of the government’s own authoritarian power-grabs, coverups, and conspiracies, a relatively unfettered internet may be our sole hope of speaking truth to power.

The right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

You see, disinformation isn’t the problem. Government coverups and censorship are the problem.

Unfortunately, the government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power, reveals its corruption, exposes its lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. Every day in this country, those who dare to speak their truth to the powers-that-be find themselves censored, silenced or fired.

While there are all kinds of labels being put on so-called “unacceptable” speech today, the real message being conveyed by those in power is that Americans don’t have a right to express themselves if what they are saying is unpopular, controversial or at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Remember, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

This is the same government whose agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies to identify potential threats.

This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.

This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Thus, no matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. For instance, the very same mass surveillance technologies that were supposedly so necessary to fight the spread of COVID-19 are now being used to stifle dissent, persecute activists, harass marginalized communities, and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

The next phase of the government’s war on anti-government speech and so-called thought crimes could well be mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.

Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

This is how it begins.

In communities across the nation, police are already being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

While these programs are ostensibly aimed at getting the homeless off the streets, when combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, they could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

As the Associated Press reports, federal officials are already looking into how to add “‘identifiable patient data,’ such as mental health, substance use and behavioral health information from group homes, shelters, jails, detox facilities and schools,” to its surveillance toolkit.

Make no mistake: these are the building blocks for an American gulag no less sinister than that of the gulags of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

The word “gulag” refers to a labor or concentration camp where prisoners (oftentimes political prisoners or so-called “enemies of the state,” real or imagined) were imprisoned as punishment for their crimes against the state.

The gulag, according to historian Anne Applebaum, used as a form of “administrative exile—which required no trial and no sentencing procedure—was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.”

This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by making them disappear—or forcing them to flee—or exiling them literally or figuratively or virtually from their fellow citizens—is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Now, through the use of red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, and pre-crime policing prevention programs, the groundwork is being laid that would allow the government to weaponize the label of mental illness as a means of exiling those whistleblowers, dissidents and freedom fighters who refuse to march in lockstep with its dictates.

Each state has its own set of civil, or involuntary, commitment laws. These laws are extensions of two legal principles: parens patriae Parens patriae (Latin for “parent of the country”), which allows the government to intervene on behalf of citizens who cannot act in their own best interest, and police power, which requires a state to protect the interests of its citizens.

The fusion of these two principles, coupled with a shift towards a dangerousness standard, has resulted in a Nanny State mindset carried out with the militant force of the Police State.

The problem, of course, is that the diagnosis of mental illness, while a legitimate concern for some Americans, has over time become a convenient means by which the government and its corporate partners can penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors.

In fact, in recent years, we have witnessed the pathologizing of individuals who resist authority as suffering from oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), defined as “a pattern of disobedient, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.”

Under such a definition, every activist of note throughout our history—from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon—could be classified as suffering from an ODD mental disorder.

Of course, this is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced, declared unfit for society, labelled dangerous or extremist, or turned into outcasts and exiled.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how you subdue a populace.

The ensuing silence in the face of government-sponsored tyranny, terror, brutality and injustice is deafening.

This article was originally published at The Rutherford Institute.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30