America This Week, September 1, 2023: "There Will Be Censorship"

You'll notice the fixtures behind me.

I have retreated to the bathroom now.

They're even worse out there than they are in here.

I also have no voice given that I choked on a supplement the other day and had to induce

a kind of retching in order to get it out, rather than call my wife for the Heimlich,

which I would have found embarrassing.

Like, remember that time I gave you the Heimlich?

That's a Category 4 debt in marriage, you know.

up these horrible pills I'd taken.

I don't know what I was hoping.

Some boost to my masculinity or my vitality.

I'm not sure.

It wasn't worth it, but I scorched my throat, and it's just terrible, so I apologize.

Do you still feel it?

can still feel it.

The lung has a kind of muscle memory for obstructions.

They're not about that at all.

Well, I'm sorry to hear that, Walter.

That's terrible.

I'm just fired up.

I don't know why.

I think a line has been crossed.

I don't usually take this stuff personally, but we should set it up.

So in the last week or so, a series of things have happened that have dramatically advanced

the landscape of internet censorship, speech suppression.

The European Union, their Digital Services Act went into force, and we're going to get

into what that means because there's some aspects to that that should really freak out

anybody in the United States.

But particularly if you live in Europe and you don't know what this is, you're going

to want to look up this law pretty quick because it's dramatic.

And for Americans, it's clearly the future for us.

I mean, this is what's coming.

But then here in the United States, we had a number of incidents.

There was an incident involving an American in Germany named CJ Hopkins who got actually

sentenced to 60 days in jail for a book cover that has basically an indistinguishable outline

of a swastika on it that he was using critically, not to endorse the Third Reich, but otherwise.

So he actually got jail time for speech, a non-story in America.

But the big thing was the gray zone.

And we've talked before about interruptions to GoFundMe campaigns, but the gray zone,

which is Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, sort of left-leaning, I guess, anti-war journalists,

they had a $125,000 fundraising campaign frozen for no reason at all.

And there's a reason why this is different.

But Walter, what was your reaction to this news?

Because I lost it when I heard about this.

The gray zone is a website that reports on foreign affairs, mostly, war and peace,

and does so rather critically of the U.S. establishment, particularly what Mark Twain

would call the war party.

It reports critically, but using, I think, very high journalistic standards, and it has

fine journalists associated with it.

And as I understand it, they started a GoFundMe in order to sort of seed the careers at the

gray zone of three journalists, younger journalists, who they were hoping to get off the ground.

And that was the basis of the campaign.

So what happened to it?

eight hours at Heathrow, if you remember.

Just for coming, they just, he's English.

He came into the country and was questioned about his sort of views on Ukraine on the

way in the country.

So this was a, it was a campaign to raise money to basically fund the reporting of Kit

Clarenberg, Wyatt Reed, and I'm forgetting who the third person, it might be Anya Parampil.

I can't, I can't remember.

But they just froze it without any explanation.

External forces, they said.

What does that mean?

It means the man or the powers that be.

It's one of those spooky euphemistic explanations that they were supposed to understand, I think,

implicitly.

Now, just so that everybody can sort things into the right piles, is the Gray Zone a left

wing or a right wing publication?

Yeah, I would say that the people who work there would certainly describe themselves

as left wing.

I think their politics are in that direction.

And, you know, I talked to Max yesterday, Max Blumenthal, and he's obviously furious.

He sees this as a, just the latest in a way he was almost casual about it because they've

dealt with a series of things beginning, you know, including the detention of their

reporter, Kit Clarenberg.

But also remember, Aaron Maté's name was forwarded by the FBI to Twitter by the Ukrainian

Secret Service, the SBU.

We found Aaron's name in the Twitter files as on a list of accounts that the Ukrainian

government wanted, wanted removed.

Now, they didn't do it.

Twitter, to its credit, didn't do it.

But the FBI passed that note on.

And so, GoFundMe has already had a series of episodes that have been politicized.

We had the Freedom Convoy last year, at the beginning of last year, where something like

$10 million was raised to basically to support the protesting Canadian truckers in the beginning

of last year.

I think it was actually $7.8 million.

And then GoFundMe put a stop to the fundraiser.

They must have because those donors were then tracked down by some of them by journalists.

So, you know, something along those lines.

But they did this in conjunction with Canadian authorities.

They issued a statement saying, we now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously

peaceful demonstration has become an occupation with police reports of violence and other

unlawful activity.

So, there, at least they cited violence.

Remember, there was another incident a couple of years ago that people forget about.

I thought this was this significant serious incident, but nobody talks about it because

this issue was so radioactive.

But Abigail Schreier, the author of the book Irreversible Damage, which looks at the trans

movement and really mainly focuses on the question of, you know, why more young girls

now are transitioning in a world where previously, you know, mostly it was happening in the other

direction, right?

It was young men who were transitioning.

That book became, it was denounced as transphobic.

Amazon refused to run ads from her publisher, Regenery.

Kirkus, which reviews everything, did not review her.

There was an uprising at Spotify when she went on the Joe Rogan show.

But then just sort of quietly amidst all of this, there was a group that tried to raise

money because she couldn't advertise on Amazon.

There was a group that tried to raise money literally to rent billboard space to publicize

her book.

And GoFundMe shut that down, too.

Now, there have been other incidents, but this is a significant step forward because

there couldn't possibly be anything like a legitimate reason to suspend the GoFundMe

campaign paying for legitimate reporting of a website that you may disagree with.

But they haven't been convicted or even accused of a crime.

And they're saying openly that this is external forces that are making this decision.

Since when is that OK?

This is a dramatic step forward in terms of the suppression of speech in this country

and really everywhere.

Once they get the lock on the money, that's when it becomes irreversible, I think.

Ministry of Truth has now jacked itself in to whatever the Ministry of Prosperity is

or whatever.

I don't know that there was a Ministry of Finance in Orwell.

He didn't quite get this connection.

Another knock on Orwell, the prophet who didn't see so completely because he

thought that Stalin's Russia was the be-all and end-all of totalitarianism,

didn't realize it would get all sexy and modern the way it has.

So yeah, they now have a warning.

They're bankers, too, because once this news goes out that you're radioactive,

who wants to stick with you?

I mean, I'm not saying that anyone else has abandoned the gray zone,

but I'm sure they're all considering it.

Matt, sometimes I feel like we're watching a bowling ball fall from the top floor of

a skyscraper and as it crosses the 90th floor on its way down, we go,

can you believe it crossed that line?

And then it crosses the 89th floor and we go, this is too much.

And at the 70th floor, we say, this has to stop.

But the truth is the bowling ball is ruled by gravity and is going to go all the way

as far as I can tell.

And the point at which I'm going to be outraged again is unforeseeable,

because shock and surprise no longer do it.

We either have to take a very cool, fatalistic view of what's going on,

or we have to strategize about how we can change it.

And you and I, being journalists, of course, believe that consciousness

and raising consciousness is itself a measure of, you know,

objection in this case, because we're editorializing.

But I fear for, I don't fear for anything anymore.

I await the bowling ball hitting, you know, floors 10 and then the ground.

Because look at this.

The reason they're doing this isn't because the Ukrainian war and the support of it

by the American government is in danger.

There aren't mass protests on the streets.

This isn't the 1960s.

Have they had problem one getting through any one of their funding efforts?

I mean, you know, the money is sliding to Ukraine without any obstacles.

There isn't any anti-war movement to speak of in the United States.

So why are they doing this?

Why are they acting the way you would expect them to act maybe in crisis

or when they're losing?

But not when they are passing, you know, billion dollar funding bills every other week.

I think they're doing it because they can.

This is a raw exercise in power.

We're not in a moment of political negotiation where, you know,

some big anti-war movement is taking shape.

I mean, it's not even the Canadian truckers.

There's no one out there with signs.

You know, there's some blowback in terms of social media discourse,

but it hasn't affected political reality yet.

So why are they acting like we're in some kind of,

you know, last ditch effort to save an endangered policy?

You know, going through the Twitter files, I was looking at some old stories,

and I found an incident that we never wrote about,

but it's in there involving Bill Gates, where they had hashtags

that people were upset about.

There was an unnamed client that Twitter described

that said they were worried about the hashtag cancel Bill Gates

or hashtag expose Bill Gates.

And there was internal discussion about this,

and they were wondering what to do because we don't have a reason to do it, right?

Like that was the problem that these executives were dealing with.

We have an upset client who's unnamed, an external client,

but we don't have a reason to get rid of this hashtag.

Then they went and looked, and they found,

oh, we've already denial listed hashtag cancel Bill Gates

because it somehow crossed their algorithm.

So then they went in, and because they already had an algorithmic strike

against this term, they did what they call a proactive denial list.

On variations of that.

And so I think what happens in this situation,

clearly Aaron, Max Blumenthal, Kit Clarenberg,

and Anya Parampil and the other members of the gray zone,

they're clearly on some kind of list already.

Aaron obviously ended up-

but is it a list at GoFundMe or is a list somewhere

in Homeland Security or Defense Department?

Where would it exist?

It could be a global engagement center situation.

I can't say that with certainty, but would they define

the gray zone as being part of a Russian information ecosystem?

Probably.

And some of these algorithmic techniques, they're one hop or two hop.

So if X figure who's banned from GoFundMe already

retweets the gray zone, that might trigger something.

It's possible that this is an automated decision is all I'm saying.

That's in the realm of possibility.

But still, as you say, why do it?

Once it becomes a news story, rather than pull back immediately,

which they haven't done yet, clearly this is still going on.

And that's a human decision, just as there were human decisions

behind these other incidents involving the playwright,

C.J. Hopkins in Germany, or Roger Waters, or even somebody who works for me,

Matt Orfalea, he got dinged this week for something ridiculous.

Oh, it was a video that we ran last year comparing

sort of Trumpian election denialism to the two Democrats in 2016 saying

this election is rigged.

It was just a series of clips placed side by side.

There was no editorial or anything whatsoever.

They later reviewed it, said it was suitable for all advertisers,

sent us a note saying that.

But then subsequently, they had another person re-look at it

and decide that this violated their harmful policies.

This is YouTube?

Yeah, YouTube.

And that there was a possibility that it could incite...

Let me find the exact language because it's so infuriating.

But these are things that are done intentionally.

Yeah, let me see.

With harmful or dangerous acts.

This is the findings from Human Review.

Your selection possibly includes glorification,

recruitment, or graphic portrayal of dangerous organizations.

This is content that may contain situations that may endanger participants,

which is just absurd.

I mean...

So, I mean...

So yeah, just to review, his videos are simply mashups of pre-existing footage

pointing out perhaps hypocrisy or conflicts or,

you know, just comparing and contrasting the reporting of different stories without

overt editorial comment.

So, which were the situations that...

All of the situations were those at MSNBC and CNN and Fox or whatever it was that he

took these clips.

Shouldn't...

How is it that they don't get, you know,

they don't get banned or they don't get flagged, but

everything that's purely derived from them gets flagged?

I guess it's not just speech anymore that we have to worry about.

It's mere exhibition of artifacts in a way that is

thought to be unflattering or, quote, dangerous.

But isn't it always...

I mean, you're the one who knows.

Isn't it always a kind of national security argument that they're making?

But then there's also a safety argument here as though somehow civil disorder or

something is at risk.

Some of those videos were marked unsafe previously.

And yes, they are moving into this direction.

And this is this whole classification of malinformation.

And this is what people don't get.

And they're like, oh, what's wrong with taking down fake news or misinformation or

disinformation?

Well, the problem is they don't just do that.

Like, there are all sorts of reasons why things can be taken down.

For instance, we saw accounts that were taken down because people entered search

terms based on content they had seen from tweets that had been banned.

So let's say it was one of those exposed Bill Gates tweets.

And there's information in that tweet.

They enter a search term that comes from that tweet.

That tweet then becomes itself bannable.

And so even the act of looking up and checking and reviewing things that actually are facts

that aren't, that isn't misinformation, that becomes...

That's called thought control.

Because the search is not an act of speech in any public sense.

It's merely a thought in the mind of the of the searcher that they, you know, that they

employ in order to get somewhere.

So they're censoring before there has even been a speech act there on the basis of basically

articulated thought, typed in, you know.

That is cutting it off at the root.

I mean, my God.

It in other words, there could be no public effect from putting a search term into a computer.

You know, no one can argue that that could incite anything or excite anything or, you

know, disturb anyone.

It was a private act.

It's a private act and yeah, it becomes a public menace.

YouTube has already had a policy of dinging and applying strikes to people who have uploaded

their videos privately, like they're ready to go.

They're on the site, but they haven't been displayed yet.

People get strikes for stuff that isn't even public or for making the search terms.

But this concept, you know, I mentioned before the, you know, we've decided to proactively

denialist, you know, cancel Bill Gates and variations thereof.

You know, there's a story that you and I have talked about before.

We might as well reveal that, you know, there's something coming about this.

But, you know, we found documentation that Twitter was exploring.

Let me find the exact language here.

There was a tabletop exercise in October of 2020.

And at the conclusion of that tabletop exercise, they listed a series of action items.

Things that had come out a couple of weeks before the election.

I mean, what were they gaming?

What were they war gaming?

series of things almost like minutes to the meeting.

And the first thing they listed was action item, explore proactively the denialist trends

related to claims of victory November 3rd through that week.

So this gets to what you were saying.

Without knowing the exact context of that, we can't say exactly what they were up to,

but we do know that proactively deny listing anything is automatically illegitimate censorship.

Yes.

Let's explore proactively denialist in claims of victory in the upcoming 2020 presidential

election.

So somebody was already, whether they employed this or not, they were at least, at least

war gaming the idea of proactively denialist thing, which among other things means G amplifying

or almost eliminating in some cases, claims of victory by one side or another, like they

don't specify, but you can use your imagination there.

But think of the arrogance of this too, before you even know whether these claims are legitimate

or not, whether there's any basis to them or not, before you even know what they're

about, we're going to proactively denialist this material.

Now, in the case of the Bill Gates thing, they actually made some errors, right?

Like there were some hashtag expose Bill Gates tweets that were, among other things, posted

true mortality rates of COVID.

And that was considered misinformation because it sent the wrong message about vaccination,

but it was true.

And so this is where we get into this whole area of we're going to choke off speech.

We're going to make it difficult for you to look up true facts.

We're going to make it hard for you to raise money to do the reporting that would come,

that would allow you to have a different opinion about anything.

I mean, it's just an extraordinary range of things.

We can't stop you.

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