March 21, 2024 - 6:30pm
At the end of last week, the Anti-Defamation League — an organisation once dedicated to fighting antisemitism which is now a node in the Democratic Party-aligned “censorship industrial complex” — posted the following on X:
As digital social spaces, online games should be regulated to address hate & extremism. It’s vital for Congress to examine extremist radicalization in these spaces & we are grateful to @RepLoriTrahan for leading this effort. An important piece to read: https://t.co/LJpLgJSTcB
— ADL (@ADL) March 14, 2024
The post links to an op-ed in The Hill calling on the US Government to regulate online video game platforms and fight “hate, harassment, and the perpetuation of extremist ideologies”. The article references the gargantuan size of the gaming industry ($200 billion in revenue), while noting with some trepidation that online gaming sites act as “social platforms that channel user communication and enable networking and community building” — beyond the prying eyes of the Government.
This article provides a window into a new censorship front in the US: the gaming industry, which is supposedly now a bastion of unregulated speech, or, in Government Newspeak, “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “violent extremism”. The ADL, meanwhile, is an active partner in these efforts.
During a recent social media spat over wokeness in video games dubbed “Gamergate 2”, for instance, X users noted an oddly catastrophising blog post from a “mental health in gaming” nonprofit called Take This. The post warned that an alleged “harassment campaign” against employees of Sweet Baby, Inc. — a “narrative development” studio focused on improving minority and LGBTQI+ representation in video games — was fuelling (and being fuelled by) the 2024 US presidential election, and urged industry stakeholders to “clearly and unequivocally denounce” gamers who don’t want the equivalent of sensitivity readers for their video games.
It turns out, though, that Take This’s self-described mission to “normalize mental health challenges” and “honor intersectional experiences” in the gaming industry is funded by the US security state: the organisation was the co-recipient of a $700,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2022, dedicated to the monitoring of “extremist exploitation in gaming spaces”. Its partners in that project included Middlebury’s CTEC, an academic “counterterrorism” institute, and Logically, a British company which served on the UK Government’s Counter-Disinformation Unit, using AI tools to surveil “journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticised pandemic policies,” according to a January investigation from Lee Fang.
In that role, Logically flagged as mis- or disinformation reports from experts questioning the utility of vaccine passports, social media posts suggesting that the Covid-19 virus escaped from a lab, and arguments against Nato expansion from British anti-war groups. Logically has since graduated to monitoring election-related “misinformation” for a subsidiary of the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit managed by a branch of DHS.
Further, a recently released report from another US Government agency (GAO) stresses the need for DHS and the FBI to develop “strategies and goals for sharing threat information with social media and gaming companies”. The report claims, dubiously, that gaming “promotes domestic violent extremism and has influenced several high-profile attacks” — the “evidence” here being that the Buffalo shooter live-streamed his attack in the style of a first-person shooter game.
A quick look at the list of “experts” consulted for the report, however, gives the game away: in addition to three employees from the ADL and one from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the list is a Who’s Who of the central players in America’s pandemic-era censorship regime, including CTEC (the institute partnered with Logically and Take This on the DHS grant), CIS (the DHS-controlled nonprofit contracting with Logically), and the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab — a member of the Election Integrity Partnership, which served as the US Government’s “deputized domestic disinformation flagger” during the 2020 election, in the words of journalist Michael Shellenberger.
A February 2021 “Disinformation Primer” from the USAID, released last week, similarly urged Government agencies to target “alternative media spaces”— including message boards and gaming sites — as sources of “problematic information”. The same primer recommends a number of sub rosa tactics — such as “prebunking” and “debunking and discrediting” (bureaucratese for coordinated character assassination against alleged misinformers) — in order to halt the spread of false information.
In other words, under the pretext of fighting “domestic terrorism” and “misinformation”, the US Government and its nongovernmental partners — including the ADL and explicitly partisan organisations such as the SPLC — are declaring a national security interest in surveilling and censoring the speech of American citizens while they play Call of Duty with their friends.
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SubscribeTata Steel turning our virgin steel plants into tin can recycling centres and building a battery factory, all subsidised by the taxpayer for a ‘green’ ideology. A sad indictment of what this country has become.
“……. in these atomised times, of an associational life based on shared interests, fun, and a kind of everyday camaraderie.” Simply having fun and enjoying life. Long may it continue.
I really enjoyed this essay. Good stuff. Land Rover is definitely a status symbol in Canada, not a work vehicle.
I need to change a front signal light bulb in my 2016 Dodge Ram. I might have to bring it to the dealer. It’s so damn complicated and I need a ridiculous socket wrench extension. I knew something was up when the YouTube vid was 10 minutes long.
“a story of manufacturing prowess unlocked by foreign capital”
And the tragedy of that story for Britain is that there was always plenty of domestic capital to unlock that manufacturing prowess, it’s just that so much of it was being allocated to perennially more expensive houses – one of the least productive assets a nation can accumulate, but one of the least risky for shiftless bankers to lend against.
And that happened during 2 1/2 decades where the low birth rate meant house prices should have fallen. Without 400k+ net immigration a year since 2003 we would have had flat or falling house prices and people could have invested excess money into the productive sector.
We still could!
Perhaps it’s a delicious irony that the Parsi compradors of Bombay like the Tatas first flourished on account of the East India Company’s opium trade with China in Bombay.
They are now ruling the roost in twenty first century Britain.
From steel to car making.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Parsis+of+India+and+the+opium+trade+in+China.-a0210368290
Britain and America both made the decision to adopt free trade policies that helped greatly reduce world poverty.
This was accomplished at the cost of obliterating their industrial base, and enriching a newly obstreperous China.
It’s also impossible to manufacture ships, planes, and weapons when you have no factories.
Banks and software companies can do a lot of good. But a nation needs an industrial base to survive, particularly in a hostile world.
I agree. It was a hugely selfish decision to obliterate manufacturing.
“.. luxury goods are not a promising basis for a modern economy ..”.
Oh I don’t know, LVMH is bigger than the rest of the Paris stock exchange put together.
I think the take away from this article is not the cars, but the people. The industry and creative energy of self selected hobbies seem to support groups of energized joyful people. Definitely a path worth following.
All I can remember is sitting in the back of a land rover, on metal, with a bunch of kids and fistfuls of halters, being driven up the Downs, to be unloaded and catching the ponies and riding them back down to the yard, bareback, leading one or two, often cantering, no helmets. That is what land rovers mean to me.
(Circa 1958).
A great article, thank you, it brought make fond memories.
I owned a series 2A and series 3 Landy, awesome vehicles that would go anywhere, slowly! I used to regularly drive my 3 from Cirencester to Reading and use the hard shoulder on the M4 so as not to slow down lorries.
The 2A had a split windscreen with wipers that barely worked and had individual motors that had to be spun to get the wipers working. The door locks were shot, and I used a hasp and staple and padlock to lock the doors. I once left it open in a car park, the car wasn’t stolen but the Mars bar on the seat was!
I wouldn’t touch, nor could afford, a modern one, and have used Isuzu for many years, but they too are not as good as they used to be.
Rather than stand for ‘manufacturing prowess,’ these gas-guzzling, road-hogging pieces of crap are an excellent way to identify people whose brains have been practically embalmed with money (to borrow a phrase from William S Burroughs) or are just so insanely foolish they’re willing to spend half their pay leasing one. The designers and marketers of these things are even more culpable. I’m tired of having local air quality destroyed for my children by stupid people who want the ‘status’ of a monster SUV, or — as a cyclist (the bicycle is how real tough guys travel) — having my already limited road space even further limited. The problem is even more urgent in Canada where, according to the IEA, people drive the least fuel-efficient vehicles of anywhere on the planet, and almost none of these vehicles are necessary — that is, almost never used for their purported off-road capability. Well, Canada is especially stupid…
The modern Landrover sits very lightly on the planet because of its superb modern engineering. The old ones, which I prefer, last so long that that largely compensates for the inefficiency at the exhaust pipe
Lightly on the planet indeed! A comparison of the 2024 Defender hybrid versus the 2024 Toyota Corolla shows it uses twice as much fuel. Then there are the extra resources needed to make it because it’s so huge, and then the extra wear on public roads due to the same.
The Range Rover is the most stolen vehicle in the UK, insurance will set you back on average £6k.
No it’s not, no it isn’t. How many Range Rovers were stolen in the UK last year? 11. Eleven.
But that reputation is a great excuse for increased insurance costs!!
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been disgusted by people complaining about gas prices. People say gas prices are too high but I look around and see people driving Escalades, Navigators, Explorers, and even people in trailer parks with their Rangers and F150’s and I think actually they’re not high enough. Some people just drive around as a form of recreation, which strikes me as basically lighting money on fire to watch it burn. I suppose back before the Internet there wasn’t much to do out in the countryside. Perhaps this behavior finally dies off with the boomer generation.