Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi: Media as propaganda and censorship bureau: The Jewish angle

The podcast, which you can view at the bottom of this article, is interesting for several reasons. Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi are both what would, until very recently, be considered mainstream journalists. Now they see themselves on the outside of a monolithic system where information has been completely politicized to the point of it being, in Taibbi’s words, “a one-party media environment.” I rather doubt that either of them are Trump supporters, but they realize that if Trump loses, things will get even worse. Self-censorship, which is undoubtedly already high, will increase as lines that cannot be crossed without ending one’s career touch on ever more subjects. They compare the situation to the Soviet Union where everyone knew that the official media could not be trusted, but underground Samizdat documents were treasured. I can’t help thinking we are already there in the sense that people like me are forced to turn to podcasts and websites that are well outside the mainstream, in a situation of constant deplatforming by financial companies and media companies like YouTube.

Taibbi notes that there was a sea change after the 2016 election where basically organizations like the NYTimes had a “come to Jesus” moment” when they asked themselves how could we let this happen and decided to become overtly political, throwing a sop to conservatives by hiring someone like neocon Bret Stephens to appease conservatives while at the same time promoting the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and ginning up the White guilt narrative with the 1619 Project, while completely suppressing the Hunter Biden-Joe Biden scandal, the evidence for which, in my opinion, is overwhelming. At the same time they ignored the real reasons why Trump won—Taibbi mentions neoliberal economics (implying replacement-level immigration and outsourcing American jobs) and economically struggling and poor Americans. But left unmentioned is the feeling of unease by a broad swathe of White Americans that their country is being taken away from them and that it’s increasingly unrecognizable from the country they grew up in. Unmentioned also is that a great many Whites are feeling racially dispossessed by the replacement-level immigration that has occurred, and they are increasingly aware that they are hated by our liberal-left hostile elite.

As they note, the problem is that when you suppress what is really going on and the reasons for it, you are left with increasingly unconvincing narratives—as happened in the USSR. And in the US, where there is still a large segment of the White population that has not trusted the liberal media for decades, mainly because of mainstream conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh, what is happening before our eyes is radical polarization. The possibility of civil war is discussed—a possibility mentioned several times on this site. Civil war seems reasonably  likely if Trump wins. One can imagine antifa-BLM violence far beyond anything seen thus far breaking out in all major urban areas, and it would inevitably require a major military force to bring it under control. And if he loses, there will deep anger among Trump supporters. Unlike the left, the right has not shown much of an appetite for violence lately, but that could change. We have already seen armed White men standing up against antifa-BLM protesters who were bussed in to their communities. For many such White men, free speech may not be their #1 priority, but having guns is very important and would loom large in the context of a far left government influenced by the likes of Kamala Harris (who has already said she would issue an executive order on gun ownership if Congress fails to act). It seems likely that Biden would be similarly prone to such actions.

Undiscussed by Hedges and Taibbi is the very prominent role of Jews in all this. Throughout the 2016 campaign and beyond there have been intense denunciations in the Jewish media and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) comparing Trump to Hitler, promoting impeachment, etc. The apocalyptic response to Trump’s election went far beyond the New York Times. And, while acknowledging that a minority of Jews supported Trump and still do, Jewish power in terms of media ownership and production is also a critical aspect. Journalism is like the academic world in that it is a top-down system where the elite media play an outsized role. In academia, Harvard professors train graduate students who get positions at UC-Berkeley, who then get graduate students who staff lower-level state colleges, who then train K-12 teachers. In the media, the New York Times, Jewish-owned for over a century, is the Harvard of the media food chain, and other outlets, from WaPo, the LATimes and NPR to CNN and MSNBC—all with large Jewish ownership and/or staffing, take the Times’ lead. In effect this media behemoth ends up speaking with one voice. And in the internet age, this one voice has been amplified considerably by the dominant social media companies—again with large Jewish ownership and staffing, and all of which have slanted searches or censored posts that they view as contrary to their liberal-left political agenda. The suppression of the New York Post story by Twitter is Exhibit A. And again, we on the dissident right have been dealing with this for years. It’s obvious that another Trump victory would be seen in apocalyptic terms by the liberal-left media.

Also unmentioned is the role of the ADL in pressuring media companies to censor speech they don’t like. This has been going on for decades but quite obviously is reaching fruition now. I wrote this in 2002 (Preface to the paperback edition of Culture of Critique, lvii:

In CofC (Ch. 8) I wrote, ‘one may expect that as ethnic conflict continues to escalate in the United States, increasingly desperate attempts will be made to prop up the ideology of multiculturalism … with the erection of police state controls on nonconforming thought and behavior.’ As noted above, there has been a shift from ‘the culture of critique’ to what one might term ‘the culture of the Holocaust’ as Jews have moved from outsiders to the consummate insiders in American life. Coinciding with their status as an established elite, Jewish organizations are now in the forefront of movements to censor thought crimes.⁴⁰

The Internet is a major gap in control of the major media, but Jewish organizations have taken the lead in attempting to censor the Internet. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) distributes a compact disc titled ‘Digital Hate 2001‘ that lists over 3000 ‘hate sites on the Internet.’ Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL have attempted to pressure Internet service providers (ISP’s) like AOL and popular websites like Yahoo into restricting subscriber access to disapproved websites. Recently Yahoo removed 39 Internet clubs originally identified as ‘hate sites’ by the SWC.⁴¹ Internet auction sites have been subjected to protests for selling Nazi memorabilia.⁴² Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com have come under fire for selling Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The ADL also published a report, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online, and has urged the U.S. Congress to initiate a ‘comprehensive study of the magnitude and impact of hate on the Internet.’⁴³

Online services in the U.S. are also under pressure from foreign governments, including France, Germany, Austria, and Canada, where there are no constitutional guarantees of free speech. For example, a judge in France ruled that Yahoo was violating French law by delivering Nazi memorabilia to people in France via the company’s online auctions, even though the service is based in the United States. Yahoo was acting illegally, the judge said, even though the company has created a separate French site that, unlike the broader Yahoo service, follows French law. The company was ordered to use filtering technology to block politically sensitive material from appearing on computers in France or face fines equivalent to $13,000 a day. In Germany, a court found that German law applies even to foreigners who post content on the Web in other countries — so long as that content can be accessed by people inside Germany. In this case, the court ruled that an Australian citizen who posted Holocaust revisionist material on his Australian website could be jailed in Germany. Theoretically it would be possible for Germany to demand that this person be extradited from Australia so that he could stand trial for his crime.

Jewish organizations have been strong advocates of laws in European countries that criminalize the distribution of anti-Jewish material. For example, the ADL pressured the German government to arrest a U.S. citizen who distributed anti-Jewish materials. Gary Lauck was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany on the warrant of a Hamburg prosecutor. He was sentenced to four years in jail, served his sentence, and was deported.

This sort of government-imposed censorship is effective in countries like France and Germany, but is not likely to succeed in the United States with its strong tradition of constitutionally protected free speech. As a result, the major focus of the Jewish effort to censor the Internet in the United States has been to pressure private companies like AOL and Yahoo to use software that blocks access to sites that are disapproved by Jewish organizations. The ADL developed voluntary filter software (ADL HateFilter) that allows users to screen out certain websites. However, while AOL — the largest ISP by far — has proved to be compliant in setting standards in line with ADL guidelines, the ADL notes that other ISP’s, such as Earthlink, have not cooperated with the ADL, and independent web hosting sites have sprung up to serve websites rejected by AOL.

The ADL and the SWC have an uphill road because the Internet has long been touted as a haven for free speech by the high-tech community. One senses a certain frustration in the conclusion of a recent ADL report on the Internet:

Combating online extremism presents enormous technological and legal difficulties …. Even if it were electronically feasible to keep sites off the Internet, the international nature of the medium makes legal regulation virtually impossible. And in the United States, the First Amendment guarantees the right of freedom of speech regardless of what form that speech takes. As a result, governments, corporations and people of goodwill continue to look for alternative ways to address the problem.

Clearly Jewish organizations are making every effort to censor anti-Jewish writing on the Internet. They are far from reaching their goal of removing anti-Jewish material from the Internet, but in the long run the very high political stakes involved ensure that great effort will be expended. I suspect that in the U.S., if pressuring existing ISP’s by organizations like the ADL and the SWC fails, these companies may become targets of buyouts by Jewish-owned media companies who will then quietly remove access to anti-Jewish websites. AOL has just recently merged with Time Warner, a Jewish-controlled media company, and it had already merged with Compuserve, a large, nationwide ISP. As indicated above, AOL-Time Warner has complied with pressures exerted by Jewish activist organizations to restrict expressions of political opinion on the Internet.

I suppose that the only option for prohibited websites will be to develop their own Internet service providers. These providers — perhaps subsidized or relatively expensive — would then fill the niche of serving people who are already committed to ethnic activism among non-Jewish Europeans and other forms of politically incorrect expression. The situation would be similar to the current situation in the broadcast and print media. All of the mainstream media are effectively censored, but small publications that essentially preach to the converted can exist if not flourish.

But such publications reach a miniscule percentage of the population. They are basically ignored by the mainstream media, and they mainly preach to the choir. The same will likely happen to the Internet: The sites will still be there [Update: or maybe not if the left gets rid of the First Amendment], but they will be out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of Internet users. The effective censorship of the Internet by large corporations does not violate the First Amendment because the government is not involved and any policy can be justified as a business decision not to offend existing or potential customers.

This was updated and expanded in 2009, and I note there that free speech was never a value of traditional Jewish communities. This then ties in with the discussion of Hedges and Taibbi on the parallels between the current situation in the U.S (and the rest of the West) with communism which definitely does not support free speech. Until communism in the USSR conflicted with Jewish interests (i.e., after World War II and especially in the 1970s due to Soviet support for Arab countries as well as discrimination against Jews in employment), Jews were quite comfortable with communism and indeed, were the backbone of communism in the United States through the 1960s. For example, Jews were the primary targets of Joe McCarthy simply because so many communists were Jews. (McCarthy did all he could to deflect charges of anti-Semitism by, e.g., hiring Roy Cohn.) The result was that Jewish organizations reluctantly and with substantial pushback ridded the mainstream Jewish community of communist-affiliated organizations.

Enjoy: