JD Vance's message is clear. Photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/Getty.
European and British politicians appeared shocked by J.D. Vance’s blunt speech in Munich last month. The US Vice President declared Washington’s top security concern to be “the threat from within” the Nato alliance and castigated assembled leaders for their increasingly brazen assaults on “democratic values”, including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties, and cancelling elections. But if this shock is not feigned then it is rather remarkable, given that these elites were in their own way already at war with the United States. All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.
Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than “shared values”. Practically, it was an implicit warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflict raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled Left-wing deep state must end — or else.
After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fuelled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Hillary Clinton would later put it, if social media companies “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.”
This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the US Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.
Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (i.e. state-funded) “fact-checking” organisations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was effectively, as one federal judge later described it, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could force internet companies the world over — including US companies — to change their behaviour in order to comply and avoid losing access. This imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century.
American “partners” quickly began setting up a network of structures to force global internet content “moderation” as part of a de facto counter-populist alliance. This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube into signing the “Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online”, which required the “removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours” and ordered them to “remove or disable access to such content” permanently. Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of “trusted reporters”, i.e. a network of ideologically aligned media organisations, often funded by the state. Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalised a vast array of “misinformation”, or the UK’s “Online Safety Act”, which made illegal such vaguely hateful behaviour as causing “needless anxiety” and “non-trivial psychological or physical harm”.
This process of regulatory political containment reached its ultimate form in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which began to come into legal force in 2023 and is now fully operational. The DSA’s “main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation”, and it does so by threatening to fine any internet platform anywhere in the world (from social media to app stores) up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down “false” or “harmful” content within a matter of hours. Information fit to be censored is determined by small committees of “experts” chosen by the European Commission. Overall the DSA is, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has rightly put it, “the most comprehensive censorship law ever passed in a Western democracy.”
For a long time, these regulatory methods worked. As revealed by the “Twitter Files” uncovered by reporters like Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, Twitter employees were for example regularly producing enthusiastic reports on the company’s global compliance with Germany’s NetzDG. Overall, Twitter’s legal policy office reported internally that it was “spending 50% or more” of its time “on global regulation” and compliance with foreign censorship demands by 2022.
The construction of this counter-populist system was formalised as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the “Christchurch Call to Action” summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers, and “civil society and partner organizations” to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online”. These commitments were self-described as “wide ranging, covering everything from applying appropriate laws and regulation to specific technical measures, to efforts to address the underlying drivers of terrorism”. (“Underlying drivers” in practice here meaning Right-populist and anti-establishment political views, quickly expanding to include any dissenting views on Covid and misgovernance during the pandemic.)
Following this, the world saw an explosion of hundreds of “non-governmental” organisations, think tanks, “fact checkers”, and academic misinformation “researchers”, all sprouting up to help coordinate censorship without borders. These organisations provided ready-made “expertise” on which governments and technology platforms could draw when deciding who to target for silencing or worse. Additionally, they could provide cover by giving the whole scheme a sheen of independence and scientific objectivity. They quickly became integral to the counter-populist project. In particular, these outfits became adept at coordinating campaigns to cut off financing for political opponents and ideological adversaries by pressuring advertisers into boycotting dissenting websites, platforms, and media outlets by smearing them as dangerous extremists.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British Labour Party cutout, proved especially effective at this ploy, successfully cutting off ad revenue flowing to perceived Right-wing sites. It also managed to drive away many advertisers from Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, with leaked CCDH documents later revealing the outfit had explicitly listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic priority. CCDH did far more than this, however; it worked hand-in-hand with governments to provide enemies lists and custom-made excuses for censoring political opponents. When CCDH published a report labelling 12 influential Covid lockdown sceptics as the dangerous “Disinformation Dozen”, 12 Democratic Party attorney generals in the United States all inexplicably sent a letter on the same day to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook citing the CCDH report and demanding the Disinformation Dozen be deplatformed. It was later revealed that the NGO and the Democratic Party had regularly shared drafts and coordinated their attacks in advance, which was of course precisely the point.
Moreover, CCDH appears to have acted as a dedicated foreign lobbyist, meeting continuously with US legislative staff and reporting internally on making “progress towards change in USA and support for STAR” — STAR being a proposed “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media” that CCDH seemed convinced America could be cajoled into adopting if Democratic Party rule continued. Perhaps this is part of what Vice President of the European Commission Věra Jourová was referring to when, at Davos two years ago, she confidently asserted that European-style hate speech laws were something “which you will have soon also in the US”.
The US Department of Justice now appears to be considering whether CCDH has therefore engaged in a coordinated foreign influence campaign while failing to register as the agent of a foreign power (the UK). Given that the Labour Party was found to have sent as many as 100 staff to the United States to help campaign for Kamala Harris, something the Trump campaign blasted at the time as “blatant foreign interference”, the Trump DOJ seems unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments for the organisation’s innocence and independence.
CCDH is just one of many similar organisations, however, including groups like Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index. Collectively, these organisations have, as an UnHerd investigation found, successfully established a cartel of “invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising” and media “fact checking”. Their purpose has been to distort and control the factual information and narratives reaching the public. In other words, they were established as political weapons.
It is striking that a significant proportion of these organisations and similar outfits, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), are commonly both partially state-funded (often by multiple countries on both sides of the Atlantic) and maintain deep connections to the various agencies of the security state. ASD’s founding board, for example, notably included such figures as John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, Richard Ledgett, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency during the Obama Administration, and Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council for Obama.
This overlap is no coincidence. As the reporter Jacob Siegel has expertly detailed, after 2016 the American security establishment began to turn the tools and tactics of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency warfare, and regime change that it had developed abroad back onto its own people. Particularly after the Christchurch Call, other Western intelligence and security services, especially among the “Five Eyes” Anglosphere intelligence sharing alliance, followed suit. They began to dramatically ramp up their direct cooperation to counter “disinformation” and leverage their own propaganda machines to “win hearts and minds”. In the UK, for instance, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a military intelligence unit tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, began to surveil and report on British citizens (despite claiming operations were directed only overseas) while working with other British government agencies and cooperating with other Five Eyes intelligence services on influence operations.
These security services had folded the perceived domestic threat of populist movements into their emerging theories and doctrines of “fifth-generation warfare”, in which the digital revolution is believed to have transformed the world of geopolitical competition into a global “omnipresent battlefield” characterised by persistent cyberwarfare and a constant struggle over “information and perception”. In this view, the minds of citizens (or “cognitive infrastructure”, as governments began to unironically refer to them) are terrain that has to be constantly fought over with rivals like Russia. This made populists the equivalent of foreign adversaries, rather than merely normal domestic political opponents.
Such a pressing threat seemed to necessitate what was described as a “whole of society” approach, meaning the totalising integration of government, military, private sector, and non-profit spheres, as well as international organisations, in service of defending “democracy”. This united front of public and private organisational power is the real “deep state”. And it is why we quickly began to see intelligence services working so closely with activist NGOs like CCDH, or with putatively private firms like Graphika, a for-profit “social network analysis” company that was initially funded by the US Defense Department to fight terrorist propaganda but then redeployed to identify and censor public discourse about Covid and other concerns.
In short, the transatlantic alliance has for years been waging a hybrid information war on the American public. Above all, its objective was to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the populism he represents. But that war failed: Trump is back and, as Vance warned the political and military leaders assembled in Munich, “there is a new sheriff in town”. The British and European allies of former president Joe Biden have been left stranded in digital trenches on the losing side of an American cold civil war. Vance was politely informing them that their cyber-soldiers had better pack up and leave the conflict zone immediately.
Vance reiterated this to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the White House last week, saying: “Look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually effect not just the British but also effect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.” He was not just talking here about American discomfort with British and European disregard for the abstract value of free speech, he was referring to their active information warfare against the United States, its new government, its companies, and its citizens. So when Starmer stammered in reply that “certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across US citizens, and we don’t…” that excuse was both transparently false and unlikely to cut it with the new sheriff.
If Britain and Europe don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reigning in their intelligence services, completely cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organisations like CCDH, and backing off of legal frameworks like the DSA and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders.
Washington’s message to its putative allies is clear: end the information war and get the hell out. Or else they may find that the new US government is willing to impose real political and economic consequences for any continued aggression.
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SubscribeWhat a Herculean piece of journalism. Thank you for being a voice of reason, Mr. Lyons.
Entirely agree. I would like to see the article expended to cover how the courts in the UK and the rest of Europe have been co-opted as a tool in this war
The UK government’s unethical pursuit of Tommy Robinson is an example par excellence of all this.
Thank you for this excellent article. At a gut level, I knew that free speech was in retreat, and that it was becoming hazardous professionally to question certain ideas and opinions, despite that fact that they were not widely shared, at least by anyone I met. Also that the Anglosphere, where I don’t live, had become home to beliefs that the rest of the world found preposterous, and that people there who I knew to be rational and decent people, had somehow come to believe (at least parts of) them.
Were I less naive, I might have guessed at the extent and systematic nature of this ongoing attempt to control ‘the narrative’, and suppress proper discussion of alternatives. It was very obvious that this was going on with COVID, but that might have been a specific to a problem and merely the result of people panicking. One doesn’t want to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’ after all.
I of course agreed with JD Vance’s comments in Munich regarding free speech. I did not however realise quite how specific they were.
It’s seriously unsettling to think where we’d be without Elon Musk, and indeed Donald Trump, as flawed as they both might be. It wasn’t just Trump that dodged that bullet. I just hope they and people like them can stay in the saddle long enough to properly stop this rot.
And there are of course people in all this who frankly belong in jail. They’ve put enough other people there for doing and saying much less.
I think the big silver lining of the Covid episode was that it opened many people’s eyes to all this, Including myself.
Much of it has/had been done surreptitiously and insidiously, unlike Covid information management, which just seemed blatant and obvious.
You think so. I can rarely find anyone who got on the Covid train who accepts any of it, the wet market, lockdown, masks, the so called vaccine, was a mistake. This includes people who I thought had sounds judgment. It seems that having bought into the narrative and can’t let go, or they are NPCs.
The conversation goes they lied to you about the virus originating in a wet market, they lied to you when they said masks were effective, they lied to you when they said their vaccine would stop you getting Covid, they lied again when they said the vaccine would stop you spreading the virus, so why would you believe them when they say the vaccine made the symptoms less severe.
Was it the case of “yes we lied to you about all that stuff but now we are telling the truth”
Of course in so far as I have checked none of these individuals are still taking the boosters.
Superb article by the way
“…none of these individuals are still taking the boosters”: economists call this “revealed preference”, and I think a lot of the nonsense being described exists in the realm of politically correct ‘speech’ and can be dispatched by the sanctity of the ballot box.
My long reply to Sean, about Ukraine propaganda. has appeared, but is in a sort of non state,so it can’t be up or down voted, and Bandera’s name was deleted. Just saying.
The rewriting of Ukraine’s recent history signifies intentional distortion. In Zelensky’s history, there was no coup, all the. deaths in the maidan protests wereccaused by the police, Azov and huge banners of , collaborationist with Nazi Germany, didn’t exist, and there was no civil war afterwards, involving for example the burning alive of over 50 supporters of Yanukovich by Azov in Odessa. No, we go straight to the alleged invasion by Russia, as if there was no actual revolt against the coup, and yet there is no evidence, satellite or otherwise, of Russian troops invading Donbass ( Sakwa estimates some 2000 Russians, official, mercenary or under cover joined the then 6.5 million citizens fighting for their guy.) There was no Poroshenko sending in troops, just the angels of democracy fighting Russian troops. There was no huge death rate of civilians in Donbass ( UN estimates 14500),shelled by western Ukraine, although Zelensky did admit laughingly in 2020 that his mates had got very good at shelling. I can’t find any evidence that. Russia actually annexed a province in 2015, though this non event now appears on the Daily Telegraph maps. And Zelensky did admit that Azov was incorporated into the regular Ukraine army, thus purifying themselves of their Nazi ideology.
Oh, and I can’t find the 25 agreements Zelensky says Russia broke.
Everything can be forgiven someone who saw his country invaded, bombed and civilians ruthlessly murdered. But the complete forgetfulness of everyone else really can’t
Well said!
Not very well. I personally visited the father of a seriously wounded young officer in the hospital (he was in a coma). He was wounded in the cauldron near Ilovaisk. By regular Russian military.
The same can be said about most of her other statements here.
I do not deny Zelensky’s stupidity and I think that Trump was right in their dispute, but this is no reason to believe in cheap Russian propaganda
Did you read Anna Bramwell’s summary of the PRE 2022 situation in the Ukraine, (starting with the Coop in 2014)?
Your comment bears no relationsip to what Anna was talking about.
Russian troops invading Donbass ( Sakwa estimates some 2000 Russians, official, mercenary or under cover joined the then 6.5 million citizens fighting for their guy.) – Her words. Sometimes it’s make sense to check what your opponent is talking about
Besides, the events of 2014 were a national uprising, not a coup, but there is no point in explaining this fact to you.
.
All the best!
If you enjoy Lyons work, I would recommend you read his recent magnum opus American Strong Gods on his Substack, The Upheaval. It might even be better than The China Convergence. He also had a recent UnHerd interview on it with Freddie Sayers a few weeks ago.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/american-strong-gods
Thanks for this MH. Will definitely read.
Thanks Matt. I came to comment the same thing and am glad that someone else beat me to it.
Agreed. I also recommend the Triggernometry podcast with Imran Ahmed (CEO of CCDH) to illustrate the problems with all these impulses in human form.
There’s a lot here, but worth the read. May freedom, peace, truth and justice prevail on our long-suffering Earth.
Thank you so much for this. It’s an important reminder how deep and pervasive the censorship industrial complex really is. If Trump wasn’t elected, Twitter would be dead and all the social media outfits would be engaging in the same censorship they have for a decade now.
The arrival of Trump and Vance has undermined and put off – at least for the moment – the European elites’ rush to introduce an Orwellian nightmare society. The moral compasses of the likes of von der Lyen, Starmer, and other self-styled ‘liberals’ are completely bent towards their own pride and power. They care nothing for those they represent. Their demonising of anyone who questions their narrative is commonplace now, as is their determination to continue to disinform and bury the truth.
In other news you apparently won’t hear anywhere, including at Unherd, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against Calvin Georgescu, accusing him of election campaign funding abuses, supporting fascist groups and other offenses. His home was raided by police, yet he hasn’t been charged with any crime. On the bright side, tens of thousands of people have been protesting the cancelled election, another item that doesn’t appear to be of interest to anyone in the democratic west.
“you apparently won’t hear anywhere, including at Unherd”. Yes, I knew this. There are lots of voices out there. A discerning person will listen to everyone, including those he disagrees with. The rubic to be used in who to listen to, is who is just foaming at the mouth verses those that try to inform. I have heard about Georgecsu’s troubles from sources that are generally leftist and socialist, but they too happen to see the growing authoritism of the European “Liberal” elites and boldly tell sides of the story that the MSM, or the “more established” opposition, such as unHeard don’t care to talk about.
Excellent article. It is no accident that we elected Trump again. There are a number of reasons, but certainly among them is that we don’t take kindly to being told what we can and can’t say.
Excellent dissection of this pernicious culture.
I rejoice when I contemplate that Messrs Trump and Vance are going to pursue these ‘people’ to the very “ends of the earth” for the next twelve years.
I trust “no quarter shall be asked, and none given”.
Let’s hope that Trump and Vance can convince the rotting deep state (DOJ, FBI, etc.) to pursue these criminals. I am not so sure; their defense is being taken up by the DNC in another burst of lawfare. AG Pam Bondi is being vilified daily in the MSM for firing corrupt DOJ personnel.
If Britain and Europe don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reigning in their intelligence services, completely cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organisations like CCDH, and backing off of legal frameworks like the DSA and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders.
…and reform their education systems to teach kids things like critical thinking skills, so they are able to sort out duff information from valid statements. My own secondary education was wholly devoid of such lessons and I certainly wasn’t encouraged to think critically at home (completely the opposite, actually) – I had to grow those skills almost overnight when I started studying law.
If we are to be given (back) the freedom which the US government is defending, we need to provide our kids with the abilities to handle it properly.
As a teacher with over 20 years in London private schools I can say that group think amongst teachers, parents and staff has spread. It is still possible to push back with logic and reasoned debate. There have been some small complaints from students but the school can not and do not censor our views. If we are careful with language, for example preface statements with “there is a counter narrative that I don’t necessarily support that agues … “, this is no longer my view but a objective consideration of someone else’s perspective and motives.
It is also possible to challenge colleagues in a friendly and non confrontational manner and most will consider and often modify a position when shallow group think is prevalent.
We do explicitly teach debate, point, counter point and consideration of bias. Education is not lost and many do appreciate counter argument and views as long as we are not preaching.
I’m glad to hear this. I have to say that at university there was a marked difference between former state school pupils like me and private school graduates.
The latter had often been given a more classical schooling, which included elements like rhetoric, philosophy and reasoning. They were much more assured and far better equipped to deal with the rigours of a law degree, right from the off.
I felt like I was drowning for 2 whole years.
You have to appreciate the complete lack of self awareness of Vance lecturing Europe on democracy when he works for a man who tried to overturn (and still refuses to accept) an election result. The same man he described as a n**i just a few short years ago that he now slavishly follows when it’s become politically convenient to do so.
He’s as two faced as Starmer, he just sits on the opposite side of the aisle
For a significant portion of US citizens, many unanswered questions remain of the 2020 presidential election results and even more popped up following our most recent in 2024. Whether we ever receive the answers to those questions remains to be seen. I do believe there is, at very least, a loose connection to the circus that was the 2016 DNC primary. Something is not right and We The People, collectively, know it. What is observed by foreigners is the sorting of the ideological divide on public display.
Speaking of foreign observations, I believe you’ve overlooked the probability that Vance has come into self awareness with respect to his previous comments on Trump. Ya know…similar to Biden’s entire political career of popping off with textbook bigotry and full-blown racism that somehow totally resolved itself when dementia took the reigns.
And let us not forget, that anything that even remotely questioned the valididy of the 2020 election was immediately removed from youtube. Excepting for a few things that they couldn’t take down, such as Guiliani’s presentations to the state legislatures of GA, WI, AZ, MI, (unedited government proceedings can’t be taken down). However, as a result, Guilani was disbarred and prosectuted for spreading disinformation.
Tell me about the 2020 election, Billy Bob…since you speak with such certainty. Was it administered on an even playing field under normal conditions?
There is still much question about the 2020 election. There were many suits brought before SCOTUS. All were lost, NOT BAISED ON THEIR MERITS, BUT ON TECHNICALITIES, such as standing, and some other obscure legal rubrics that deal with procedure as whether it is valid to bring a case to SCOTUS.
It is worth noting that the US also has a major influence operation in – let us say against – Europe. Vance and Musk clearly intend to force their politics on Europe, AfD, Farage and all, and US control of various internet companies is a major part of that. An equally good way of reading Vance is that the US demands that Europe leaves itself wide open to the US controlling our internal politics. In the modern world it is necessary to stop foreign influence operations by your enemies. From now on that includes not only Russia but the US.
Nope. The US is saying stop suppressing, demographically destroying, and enslaving your people if you want to be our allies. It would also help to reject the climate mythos.
Nice projection, Crybully. Its you that’s been influencing our politics.
It seems to me that you are both correct. Each country (or Federation) is trying to influence the other.
Personally I would rather the free speech absolutists win out overall, but these are just two opposing sides in a philosophical split in humanity, analogous to Communists v Capitalists or the Religious v the Agnostic or Atheists.
Aye. Win out overall. As when any side achieves near total sway there tends to be some combination of increased bloodshed and persecution. Only a nutter would allow his or her child to hear absolutely anything some lunatic/rabid dogmatist—left, right, center, or unhinged—wanted to tell his or her ten-year-old student.
Flimsy example? How about: Should a gigantic billboard at the center of town be allowed to say anything at all, with no exceptions that aren’t clearly criminal in and of themselves (violent threats, etc.)?
In any case, most children and adult citizens alike need to develop better average skill in separating fact from fiction opinion and good- faith discussion from mutual vilification or attempted indoctrination. Both ends of the information spectrum are “flooding the zone” with willfully blind and deliberately blinding onesidedness. It’s making even the sharper among us into meaner and more narrow-minded people.
It is not the bad practices of just one side or the other, and there’s enough guilt on either “team” to make the question “yeah but who does it more?!” of secondary importance, even damn near irrelevant. We need to cut down on it. All of us.
“Only a nutter would allow his or her child to hear absolutely anything some lunatic/rabid dogmatist—left, right, center, or unhinged—wanted to tell his or her ten-year-old student.”
Do you mean things like people can choose their own gender? That people are randomly “assigned” as male or female at birth. Or perhaps you like the narrative that has convinced about a third of all high school students in the US that they were born the wrong sex and that slicing and dicing their sex organs is the normal thing to do. Maybe your own taste runs more towards the notion that the fix for racism is more racism, or another of the 100% scumbag ideas that the woke left has championed.
LOL, After the nonsense that the leftists have had us put up with, you have absolutely no right to lecture any of us about ridiculous and dangerous information.
The Unherd, sponsored by Qanon. Apparently.
What a convincing argument. Is that it, is that all you have?
Propaganda induced MAGA speeches and Liz Truss type references to the shadowy deep state don’t inspire confidence in me. I prefer to use logic and critical thinking, in the long run it helps me make better decisions. I tend to not be very trusting of people who don’t use that approach. I’m fine with that.
Whilst I don’t particularly agree with monitoring everything that’s available on the internet, I do think that this article could be written by any Qanon inspired conspiracy theorist who believes everything they read on….. the internet.
That last sentence simply doesn’t make any sense. You may as well be saying, everything I believe is truthful, what everyone else believes in is not.
Now there are things in this article that can be taken at face value but the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) does exist, there’s an in depth article on it. It’s block highlighted in this article. I suggest you read it and watch the video.
I think we have different views. I’m fine with that.
Have you read that article and watched the video. Do you think what Clare Melford describes as “adversarial narratives” (ie doublethink for debate) is acceptable to police in a liberal democracy?
I havent read your article. But I have read this, above:
-After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information
-This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
-A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries.
There’s plenty more nonsense above aside from the 3 items above. One of the things about populist movements is they seem to have to mix 20% fact with 80% fiction. I’m sorry if I dont believe that some shadowy deep state has penetrated my mind and that the thought police are about to knock on my door.
I dont live in the US, or the UK. One thing both countries seem to have in common, or at least the populist movements, is there is a very strong tendency to blame everyone else for ALL of their own problems. I appreciate there are some elements from the US right now which are fully justified, increased NATO spending being the obvious one. But to start believing some of the Ludacris nonsense written above is not my idea of good decision making.
Originally my Unherd subscription cost me EUR 5 a month. After a few months I felt this was poor value for money, maybe one in 10 articles were worth reading. After I cancelled my subscription, I was offered a new subscription for EUR 1 per month, permanently. That is the price of clickbait (admittedly The Telegraph will try to lure you with lower, the true kings of blaming everyone else for everything), EUR 1 per month. Nothing more.
You haven’t read the article I suggested, why not because it wouldn’t support your narrative?
The progessive left has engaged in Repressive Tolerance and radical acceptance for the last 30 years. When the electorate no longer believe their narratives, what do progressives do? They double down (as all totalitarians do).
If you want to stop your opponents from adopting your tools and to also restore public trust in institutions, you must reject ideological narratives, fallacies and sophistry, and return to objective truth, evidence and logic. The very things progressives find so… “oppressive”.
Democracies exist because Utopia does not.
But the nudge unit annd its mates, such as the GDI, do exist. It is impossible to read comments about eg Ukraine without seeing that memes are being thrown into articles and comments and suddenly taken up by everyone. Ukrainian corruption? Putin’s bad influence, is my favourite. But RUSI has a special role here.
Sounds more like trying to avoid a different view.
The most obscene thing about these people—JP Morgan, BlackRock, and the real string-pullers who own the media and control the mainstream narrative—is the mental health crisis they deliberately created.
Their tactic of inducing mass psychogenic illness has had a devastating effect on the unbalanced and the unpleasant. It takes people who are merely odious and stupid and transforms them into full-scale psychotics on a mass scale. It creates emotionally unstable, mentally inept zombies. Monsters, in fact. The worst kind of human beings.
We saw this in the reaction of despicable Democrats threatening to kill Trump voters, throwing their bloody tampons at them, and engaging in all sorts of hysteria when Trump won. We see it in the replies here from people who believe the establishment’s perceived divine right to enforce ideological purity is actually a good thing.
It’s a real downer that this space isn’t exclusively filled with people who fit the intended target demographic. Good, sane people who see things clearly because they haven’t been cognitive destroyed by intellectual totalitarianism and their own vile personal make-up. Instead, it’s been dragged down by attention-seeking sad cases and triggered Left-Wing weirdos too emotionally malevolent, narcisstic and odious to hear anything other than Trump/The Right/Anyone-who-opposes-me needs to be put down because I’m right and they’re evil and have no right to think differently to me.
A society that has killed off critical thinking, shunned independence of thought, and prohibited any deviation from the ordained narrative—while criminalizing those with perfectly sane views—makes me want to explode in rage. But, of course, the usual suspects can’t even recognize it. Just like a nonce doesn’t see anything wrong with his behavior because he’s a wrongen, they can’t see it. Driven by their inner-loathing projected outwards, and the hideously delusional view of their own supremacy, they can only hate who they’ve been programmed to hate. There is no decency in them that would let them to recognize how despicable it is for political ideologues to outlaw anything but their own views.
And this has been happening for decades. The examples in the article are recent, but they stem from a larger pattern. The Brexit vote exposed the “elite” to a terrifying truth: their monopoly over the masses—once easily maintained through TV, print, and radio—was no longer total. The public had defied their Project Fear (funny how they always try to induce mass panic rather than simply presenting the facts—pure coincidence, right?). One day after the vote, the BBC launched a course on “how to spot fake news” and “fact-checkers,” and from that moment, I knew exactly what the elites’ strategy was – to convince people they’d been duped and then ignore the vote and re-run it once the masses had been ‘reducated’ the right way.
They tried the same thing in America. And LOST. LOL. Trump defeated them, and enough freedom-loving Americans saw through their manipulation to thwart them.
They operate like a brute-force virus, endlessly trying out different fear-inducing, hysteria-driven narratives because they know most people are stupid and blindly follow authority. The result is a society full of gormless ideologues and despicable little toads so hostile, poisoned, aggressive, unstable and vile they’d get battered in any pub acting like they do when they know they can get away with it. Full of ridicule, abuse, toxicity, delusional narcissism—people who genuinely believe that morality and intelligence are exclusive to their own political wing rather than innate traits.
I’ve been watching this unfold more intently and openly since the run-up to Brexit, by which point I had already figured out exactly who runs society and what their agenda with absolute clarity, so I’ve been observing this play out in real time on nearly every media outlet. But even before that, I saw it in the Marxist long march through the institutions. I’ve watched in horror, trying to understand how this descent into state-imposed thought control and the criminalization of free speech could possibly be stopped.
I never could have foreseen a figure like Trump. A man who had everything thrown at him. And yet, he was the one politician with enough self-belief and sheer grit to take it all, face down the establishment—the most powerful foe anyone could ever challenge—and still come out on top.
You express cult-like worship of Trump. Everything Trump does is already justified in your eyes, or must be rationalized. You demonize all who oppose or even disagree with him in any way. Pretty close at least. In between posting thousands of sputtering words daily, take a few moments to look at and listen to yourself.
Vance was holding up a mirror. The stifling censorship in Europe is counter productive. The anger in the UK is at pot simmering levels.
There are some woke warriors who’s de-platforming went too far, but it’s much more marginal than Author tries to convey. He latches onto certain pressure groups and gives them more credence than they ever actually had. And is he suggesting the Tech bros and their algorithms all as ‘pure as the driven snow’? Let alone the actors that can use the internet to sow division, incitement to violence with deliberate mis-information that would be illegal in the rest of the media. No he shows no balance.
Let’s see Musk et al be prepared to share their algorithms and how they work if they really believe in this free speech crusade. Won’t will they. It’s about ensuring they can continue to manipulate and any controls on that blocked.
As regards UK OnLine Safety Bill, suggest folks actually read it and don’t just accept the twisting in this article. Most drafted under the Tories. Much is about our children. Who thinks it’s been sensible what kids can easily see now that we never did? We’ve hit our children with a blizzard of Porn and Violence and the companies that allow this want to be left alone to maximise their profits!
Vance of course is always compromised. He works for someone who tried to overturn a free election that he lost by 7million votes. He likes that suppressed doesn’t he.
Don’t worry. People like you aren’t meant to see anything wrong with it anyway. It’s designed to enforce mass psychosis—a mass psychogenic illness (MPI). Only those who are smart, decent, humane, properly informed, and free-thinking will recognize the problem and reject it.
People with deficiencies in personality, cognition, or independence of thought? For them, it’s like water to fish in the ocean. These are the kinds of people you wouldn’t want to be within 100 feet of in real life due to the radioactive levels of mong they emit. Even online, their comments are arse-clenchingly bad. Every single time.
But not yours, of course. Your insights are always the very definition of nous, intellectual rigor, clarity of thought, and well-informed discourse. You’re a breath of fresh air, Watson—always telling it like it is and reminding us how pathetic we are in comparison to a true, bonafide intellectual that has special insights we don’t.
After all, we must have enforced ideological conformity rammed down our through from every conceivable angle for our own good—because we don’t hate Trump and Vance with an unhinged, mentally unstable personal animus, whipped up by our objective, honest media that always gives us the facts straight and lets us make up our own minds. That’s just not acceptable.
And because you don’t do a mirror-image version of that with Biden and other people to your left that you perceive as villains or imbeciles? Let’s hear, in less than 500 words, from the chronic and acute overposter who rants against ranting. (To be clear I mean you, not me).
Concerned about the children but OK with them being taught that cutting off their genitals is a rational way of dealing with some sort of gender dysphoria that the authorities have convinced them that they suffer from.
LOL…and then you are calling out porno with a straight face?
This war has actually become a war of corrupt European despots against their own people, Russia and the world. Russia is bad. Putin is bad. What is emerging in Europe is worse, and will backfire.
Here is whst the pro-European faction in the US is trying to do to provide media coverage:
https://youtu.be/Zgk0RTuokSA?si=r-v0Oirb7b_6tIYR
Putin and Putin’s Russia are bad. I am no fan of the Euro elites and their war on free speech, but if you think Europe is worse than Putin’s Russia well, I believe you are deluded.
Excellent article. But I suspect there is a lot more to be uncovered before we can say we understand what is going on. My guess is that there are at least three dynamics in play:
1/ The official panic over disinformation in 2017 which led – as described in this essay – to attempts to prevent its spread which then morphed into an attempt to push a single conformist view on many topics by a network of official or semi official bodies.
2/ The commercial exploitation of the above to make money on the basis of the tech bros gospel that “if something becomes technically possible it ought to be done whatever the side effects”. The Afghan war had produced approaches that attempted (unsuccessfully) to manipulate public opinion so it followed these should be deployed domestically (eg some of the fact checkers appear to have started in a restrained and sensible basis under official sponsorship but morphed into dumb woke commercial contractors within three years).
3/ Some specific campaigns launched by various players eg Israel, the MIC over Ukraine, etc which have pushed simplistic back and white lines. Basically, crude old fashioned propaganda delivered by twenty first century means.
But I am sure it is more complicated. UnHerd has produced some great articles on this topic but we need more – and a debate about what a sensible approach would be. Past technological shifts in communication eg printing, radio, TV, etc have ended up being managed through a few rules that balanced free speech, the importance of debate, the rights of the individual and the need to foster consensus. We seem to be making slow progress this time round.
I agree about the rate of progress in finding the right balance, but that’s surely down to the sheer complexity and ubiquity of the online world.
For the first time, humanity is able to see the whole of itself reflected via the digital landscape, and it’s a sight that will absolutely take some coming to terms with. But come to terms we must, and censorship will only delay that process. This era could be the defining moment for the future of our species. That may sound like hyperbole, but at the very least it’s a paradigm shift.
The important lesson is surely that censorship doesn’t work. Trump got elected. Le Pen and AfD made headway in France and Germany. Islamist attacks still continue. Woke ideology is on the back foot. And it didn’t prevent two assassination attempts on a US presidential candidate. What’s more it’s never worked. It didn’t stop Spanish anarchists in the early 1900s or Hitler in the 1930s. And it didn’t prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In practice, news gets out. And if it looks like it’s being suppressed by authorities, people start to believe it’s true, because “otherwise why would they suppress it?” Much better to have it open to scrutiny and counter-speech and to learn to be more resilient, and less trusting, about mere words.
” Islamist attacks still continue”. I am not sure why you included this line is in here. Are you saying that the Islamicists are part of the Deep State, or are you saying they are fighting against it?
Myself, I find politics in the Middle East to be increadibly convoluted an muddled, with all sorts fishing in these waters. I find both the hard core Islamicists and Zionists playing power games and more than willing to deal with each other in order to exterminate the moderates who want peace. As an aside, I find Israel to be the most woke and most brainwashed nation on the face of the earth. But even there, many know the government/rulling class is playing its own game, which is not for the benefit of those under them.
So it’s going to take a US government to tackle our UK problems.
The saddest part of this is how enfeebled and compromised the UK state and media is.
Why does no one in UK campaign for free speech here?
Why are the public so pathetic that they won’t lift a finger to assert their right to have an opinion?
Seventy and more years of State Education have sapped the moral fibre of this once great country.
What was once a nation of Lions, is now a nation of Worms.
CCDH is in the heart of No.10 even today. Its founder advises Starmer.
England is now a land of cowered pathetic people. Who in Unherd cares? They like it that way. Unherd follows the Starmer narrative like the lapdog it is.
Is there a single television journalist capable or willing to challenge Starmer on his criminalising of opinion? Is there a single UK politician who campaigns for the Facebook posters?
In this article it is taken for granted it is a fundamental human right in USA.
In UK no one can even say that. No one will.
On all objective academic measurement of cvil rights, corruption and hate speech, the USA has been shown to be a much worse offender than the UK, Sweden, and other European countries. In the USA ‘Free speech’ is more of a misnomer than in Europe, as in practice it is more of a function of economic power and so ‘free’ in a qualified sense only.
There are no data informed models that show Europe has more free speech than the USA, unless one is reading studies produced by MiniTruth.
Have you tested this “objectivity” for bias or do you simply “Trust the experts.”
No one in the US is being arrested for tweets and posts.
Yes, we’re in an omnipresent information war. Note the striking efforts made by The Times of London to promote the Ukraine war over the last three years- an astoundingly consistent level of propaganda for neocon Washington that would never even have required the involvement of the British government in the first place.
Great article. Crystallizes the reasons for the widespread concern of so many in recent years.
It’s a real shame that European establishment parties are so awful, because I don’t trust Trump, Musk and Vance either (even though a lot of the things they claim to believe fit with my own beliefs).
It feels like Trump and friends are the only hope for the West, but while the focus is on freedom of speech, avoiding nuclear war with Russia, rolling back Net Zero nonsense and securing borders (all vitally important), other anti-human projects continue or accelerate (mRNA “vaccines”, war on cash, AI everywhere).
If Trump really is our saviour, why isn’t he dead?
Are you just throwing random ideas into a blender and scrambling them into a philosophy?
His philosophy seems coherent to me.
Are you only prepared to entertain views similar to your own? Seems a bit like the strategy of those you hate on the Left to me….
Because he turned his head at just the right moment. And on the second attempt, the would-be killer was spotted with minutes to spare.
I mean, WTF? They tried to kill him twice. So it only counts if they actually succeed?
If you weren’t brainwashed, you wouldn’t even ask that question.
You couldn’t have scripted a better savior for the real world. For a Hollywood movie, maybe you’d make him slightly more refined, better looking, and less idiosyncratic.
But as a force to take on the most corrupt, evil, powerful, and destructive clique ever seen in the West, Trump is like a gift from God—if such a thing truly exists.
What he has done is build an incredible team, intent on rectifying every evil, every weakness, every bit of corruption, every act of cultural suicide, and every malign influence.
You really need to educate yourself, mate. Good grief. I’m not trying to be offensive or demeaning, but it should be patently obvious that Trump’s team is infinitely more decent, competent, and sane than the disgusting lunatics who oppose him.
Oh Boy.
Go on. Show your cards. Tell me—who is the most powerful man in the world if not Trump? Tell me the most powerful, richest, most successful country in the world if not the U.S. Who else can make them fold like a deck chair into submission?
Tell me, who else but the most powerful man in the world refuses to give a solitary f**k about appeasing the lunatic woke left that has brought the Western world to the brink of self-annihilation? Who else takes no shit from anyone, carries supreme self-confidence, and possesses far more decency and humanity than they ever portrayed him as?
Who else is better positioned to stand up to the ceaseless destruction and Islamification of the West, the self-hatred and demonization of white people, DEI quotas, ruinous open-border immigration, and the censorship outlined in this article? Who else could have forced Europe to increase its defense spending—and actually gotten it done?
Who else has real-world experience dealing with and facing down bribery and strong-arming from the Mafia at their peak under Castellano and Gotti—meaning he knows exactly how to handle people like Putin, while our lily-livered nerds act like he’s Hitler, go into hysterics, and completely fail to function.
Who else thinks outside the stale, post-war “liberal” orthodoxies and instead approaches problems pragmatically, like a results-driven businessman who actually gets shit done?
Who is pushing for a peaceful resolution while the moronic and impotent gaggle of retards in Europe and Canada attempt to act tough and call on WW3 (even though that will see Europe’s arse handed to it)—only to openly admit they can’t do a thing without the U.S. and Trump leading the way?
You people aren’t just brainwashed. You’re cognitively paralyzed, and laughable in your ignorance and stupidity.
There isn’t a single factual counterbalance to any of these points that would be credible.
And I could list even more reasons why Trump is a godsend—but if you can read the article above without dramatically reconsidering everything you thought you knew, without realizing you’ve been mind-controlled for years and fed a load of utterly deranged bollocks, then you’re too far gone.
I bet you still call him the “orange man” and run to Twitter to mock everything he does—because you have the mind of a child at a Punch and Judy show, booing on command whenever the puppeteers tell you to.
But not everyone has clarity. Not everyone lives in reality with their eyes wide open to what’s happening. Most people are like you—so don’t beat yourself up over it. Instead, try getting a clue. Learning to think for yourself might be a good start.
I think the Trump enthusiasts who reflexively commented on your post didn’t get your joke.
(Saviours are supposed to die – preferably killed by their evil enemies – before their philosophy can really get traction)
I’m not a Trump enthusiast (so to speak) though I am happy with much of what he is doing and why. I got the little joke but a=m not laughing, as I, and likely others found it somewhat offensive. But then you would appreciate it. Leftists seem to “reflexively” ignore the idiocy of their positions preferring hate and insult to actual thinking discourse.
Don’t sweat it though, we are moving on without you.
I don’t Trust Trump. But I support him. In his first term he was the only president in my memory that honored his campaign pledges. For me, he is somewhat of an unknown quantity. But I do know that he has all the right enemies.
An interesting discussion on this from the founder of Rebel News talking to Jordan Peterson. A citizen journalist point of view.
The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant | Ep 525
Are you legacy media Unherd? Of course you are. Why not change your name to Bend The Knee?
Russia has been given free reign to wage a disinformation war on this nation supporting emperor Don, and you are worried about GB
This is the next step in the reorientation of alliances and perceived enemies. All hail Putin. All hail Trump
Can you not do better that parroting shopworn talking points?
I guess not. I could have cut and pasted a far better article from the Guardian than the missive above. I suppose all you anti British sympathizers will be sleeping much better when their flats are taken over by the Russians
1995 Yugoslavia 1999 Serbia, 2001 Afghanistan, 2003 Iraq, 2011 Libya and 2014 Syria. In 2014 a coop replaced the elected moderately pro Russian government of Ukraine w/a hostile one, which oppressed the Russian speaking people of the Donbas.
All part of the USSR’s old sphere of influence. Facts speak much louder than diatribes.
Yawn….Sorry, but this drivel has been a leftist talking point for so long that it has no effect. Same with the Nazi accusations, racist charges and all the other BS that you will try. This addled-pated nonsense is trotted out by the indoctrinated no matter what the actual discussion is about.
My hope is that we can figure out some way to get rid of you folks for good as I do not believe that you can be rehabilitated. The brainwashing that elite Globalists have attacked you with is too strong. In the meantime we don’t care what you say. You are not discussing things, you are repeating lame bumper stickers like like brain dead net-bot that they trained you to be. You have my sympathy for sure.
The War on Speech—and Those Who Dare to Fight It | Ezra Levant | Ep 525
“All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.”
Thus violating the first and most important of the Left’s many self-serving behavior Commandments: “Thou shalt not tell the truth about us.”
An excellent article.
What perhaps isn’t getting enough coverage is that he the European ‘allies’ were pressed to deliver these initiatives by the US, just as they/we were pressed to support NATO’s eastward expansion which triggered Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine.
Now that these policies are abandoned and denounced by the US it is we who are left clinging to them. There is also the question of exactly who blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline – Ukrainian agents or the US? If the latter, it was a ruinously hostile act by the US against a European nation state.
What you say is partially true, but you have to go back to the fall of the USSR. This movement began then, (or perhaps slightly before). The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was part of that playbook. It allowed European ecconomic expansion into the Balkens. Europe profited by this. The European elites were more than happy to be fellow travelers in this “profitable venture”. So, the Europeans were not subservients, but fellow conspiritators.
When you’re actively working to silence people, spare me the lectures about democracy.
This article alone is worth ten years of subscription.
It redeems UnHerd from all the authors they’ve platformed recently who come here with the same grotesque mindset of needing to “educate” us against the new Hitler—bringing with them gormless TDS trolls. These are the people who made it seem like UnHerd was just a catchy gimmick rather than a serious and vital departure from the rest of the sellout publications that kowtow to the lunatic agenda of the globalists.
We need intelligent, sane journalism and information of this caliber, exposing the truly diabolical “elite” and what they are doing. This elite is a tiny handful of people who have managed to run the world in a way that makes La Cosa Nostra, the Russian oligarchs, and the South American cartels look like amateurs—and makes Marxist regimes seem like mere beginners in the art of totalitarian state propaganda. They have transferred the world’s wealth, power, and control into the hands of a select few, immune from democracy.
We are ruled by corrupt psychopaths and narcissists for whom the deaths of millions of young men, women, and children in war—simply to consolidate or accumulate more wealth—is considered their birthright. The amount of money they have lobbied for, siphoned off, and been gifted by our gormless, walking-t**d politicians is insane. And it’s all blatant—yet conveniently labeled “corporate lobbying” and made legal.
Every horror story about people trapped in narcissistic relationships—gaslit, manipulated, lied to, and subjected to sadistic abuse—has been played out on the public for many, many years. These elites care only about their own gain. Mass immigration is about cheap labor, ensuring a steady supply of uneducated workers to deliver their food and do the menial jobs. And yet, they have manipulated the younger generation into believing that immigration is solely a matter of virtue, tolerance, and anti-racism.
I’ve been watching this unfold in real time, feeling deeply disheartened that most people don’t truly see what’s happening. Even those on our side have struggled to articulate it. To finally see these organizations named and their actions backed by undeniable empirical evidence—evidence that only a madman could ignore—is incredible.
This validates everything UnHerd stands for.
Rarely read such paranoid drivel. Not worth analysis. Trump’s basket of choice deplorables are enjoying what they see as their moment. Being a charitable chap, I hope the harm they are happily inflicting on others will not be visited on them. However, in a couple of years they will resemble the Scotsman in hell. ‘Lord, I did’na ken. Weel, ye ken the noo.’
What harm are they inflicting? Do elaborate.
Test
They’ve created so mentally ill people by paralyzing their ability to think anything other than the ‘narrative’. The ‘tone’ of the people reacting to the truth of this article are all the same. Deny it and ridicule any notion of it. Exactly how they’ve been trained. ”TRUMP IS THE ENEMY – TRUMP IS THE ENEMY – TRUMP IS THE ENE….”.
It’s a ‘conspiracy theory’. God I couldn’t be in a room with these people for two seconds before attacking them, just like with nonces. They are just that odious and revolting as human beings. The level of intellect and morality they think they’re out, their extent to which they are truly informed about how the way the world works, so far from the actual reality, and the narcissism with which they believe they’re superior so galling, they set me off, as I know all the grooming gangs and terror, the Islamic bullying and intimidation and all the evil they’ve witnessed and pretended didn’t happen because they’re not allowed to think anything different but the script on those things.
The way they dehumanize and demonize is pathologically sick. But they wouldn’t do it without those in authority telling them too. Just like in the Milgram experiments.
These horrifying cowardly people do whatever those in authority tell them. They use the worlds they tell them, like deplorable, they think how the globalists tell them to think, and then when us, the sane, normal people try to enlighten them, they have nothing but toxic ridicule.
Thing is, they are so used to blindly following what their betters tell them they actually think they have intellectual autonomy.
That these people are even on Unherd is a sick joke. They must fancy themselves as free thinkers. Any independent, critical thinking ability has been deliberately and concertedly breed out of them if it was ever there at all.
My contempt for these cucks, the people at school that did whatever the teacher said and grassed on everyone else, could not be stronger.
You deny that any of this has been happening? What planet are you living on?
An outstanding article, Mr Lyons. Thank you for exposing this horrendous conspiracy to full view. It is truly terrifying that so many individuals and organisations colluded in this egregious trampling of free speech – and who took it upon themselves to destroy what they prejoratively described as populism.
Thank God for Trump (for all his obvious faults and frequently unpleasant character traits), and for Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter drew the curtain back on this darkest of eras in the history of democracy. May they continue to occupy positions of power to deal a fatal and permanent blow to this horrible movement that has so totally blighted our lives, stifled conversation even in the home and imprisoned ordinary citizens for speaking out on major issues that they do not like. UK’s track record in this regard is especially bad, and I hope that Trump and Vance pressurise Sir Smarmer to reverse this evil that keeps us all silent in the face of grave danger and provocation – not least the vilification of British history, culture and achievements.
The recent conversation with Sayers was insightful, but this article comes out of left field. Most people want to live in societies where the basic values of decency and respect prevail. Social media, especially X, is a hate-filled, ugly place, and we are all the worse for it, on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe is right on this question. Regulate the tech oligarchy before it further degrades our societies.
‘Hate filled’, or simply opinions that you disagree with?
‘Regulate’ in reality means censor.
Socialism is a hate-filled ideology. It by definition has to divide people into binaries. Is Europe planning on banning Socialist speech?
Nothing says “I am firm in my commitment to free speech” like full-throated support for a President who attempted to overturn a legitimate election and a willingness to defend those who stormed the nation’s legislature.
Vance’s efforts to lecture Europeans are, it’s fair to say, somewhat lacking in credibility.
Here in the states, many have a different view of Jan 6. May I suggest you do a deep dive on Ray Epps, an instigator of Jan 6, who was given a pass by the FBI, and defended by the MSM. Yet there is video of him leading those that breached the capital. There is also video of him trying to “rabble rouse” an assembly of people the night before, only to have the supposed subversives start chanting “FED FED FED . . . ” This is overwhelming evidence, “largely suppressed”. That the Jan 6 Riot was instigated by the DEEP STATE in order to give cover to a STOLEN ELECTION.
This is all well and good until the _next_ US president tells everyone to turn it all back on again “or else”.
Very good article, but unless I missed it you failed to mention Thierry Breton’s open letter to Elon Musk of last summer, threatening him if he went ahead with his planned interview with Trump. While many of us (in the US) knew about the coordinated censorship and propaganda campaign being waged against us by the UK, the EU, and several EU members, in collaboration with the Democratic Party and the government agencies it controlled, that letter brought home the gravity and the direct nature of the threat. It was tantamount to a declaration of war by the EU against the US.
My only real criticism, offered in a constructive way, is that the focus on censorship may distract from the equally serious threat of government directed propaganda. The whole idea of “pre-bunking” as recently touted by the odious Von der Leyen, is to fill the public’s heads with enough lies that if a glimmer of truth crosses their eyes they will dismiss it because they instinctively “know better.” The ability to do this is wholly a product of the age and technology of mass communication, which could not have been anticipated when the First Amendment tried to outlaw censorship. The only defenses against it are political vigilance and the will to stop it in its tracks if detected, and the natural skepticism of free people.
It’s the one sided nature of clamping down on disinformation like this that gets me.
In a world where no organisation who matters have defined Isreal part in the war as genocide, why are so many people able to post on social media claiming that it is?
This article would be far more poignant IF THE FOX PROPAGANDA FIREWALL Had not been lambasting America for decades in far greater proportions.
Not quite. I believe the fact-checker impact ship sailed a couple of years ago. I do not know of a family member, friend, or acquaintance who has any faith in the “unbiased fact checker”. It is propaganda, spin, and the world is worse off for not having an “independent and unbiased” organizations. Sites like Unherd, Ground News, Free press,and the Specator come close and hopefully will morph into trusted sites. I certainly hope so. Money has killed the MSM and has made deep inroads buy buying Fed, state, and local government bureaucrats and certainly the politicians. The fight is on.
Who will win?
Well the author and JDV have got a point, – UK/US/EU national socialists decided they could tell us little people – ie workers, if and when we are allowed to live our lives or eat food – ie bugs. Due to electoral democracy in USA this attack failed – for now – E-UK has no democracy so the assualt has faired well. History suggests violent bad actors like EU, sturmer, suanka etc only run away if confronted by good violent actors. Dare you to come to the Applachians adolf’s offspring- i know JDV has learned sober is better but if all else fails: Jesus loves moonshine, or meth, or any of the “pills i took” which will leave the e-uk natsocs with blood on the carpet, mirrors all broken and all of them cryin.