Censorship Is What They Demand When Their Propaganda Fails

by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Over the last six months, Public and Racket have published a comprehensive website and report on the Censorship Industrial Complex. What is the Complex? It’s a network of government agencies, government-funded NGOs, and mainstream news organizations demanding censorship of views and individuals they don’t like.

But censorship is just the final stage of a broader government propaganda and “disinformation” operation. And it often betrays the fears of the government and other societal elites that the Big Lie is no longer believable.

Consider the war on the lab leak theory of Covid’s origin. It started with a campaign of lies aimed at smearing honest scientists and journalists as “conspiracy theorists” and “racists” for pointing out that the virus appeared to have been engineered.

By the time Facebook caved into the pressure from government propagandists and censored the New York Post and many others for simply raising the possibility of a lab leak, the US government’s “disinformation campaign” was well underway.

In other words, government officials start by promoting a Big Lie — e.g., Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinfo,” Trump colluded with the Russians, etc. — and then demand censorship.

The Censorship Industrial Complex is thus part of a broader government propaganda and cover-up operation.

What’s more, demands for social media censorship by government officials and government-funded “think tanks” is often the most visible manifestation, and final stage, of a broader disinformation-and-cover-up operation.

As such, in addition to being outraged by growing demands for social media censorship, we should also view them as opportunities to expose a Big Lie. The key is to distrust every reason given for censorship. In many, if not most, instances, there is hidden reason.

Now that the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of a lab leak, US government officials are claiming, “We may never know” covid’s origin — repeating the claim by Anthony Fauci, who sent coronavirus gain of function research to China, and who is thus heavily implicated by the lab leak theory.

It was always as racist, if not more racist, to claim that the virus came from Chinese people eating bats or pangolins from wet markets. And yet reporters at The New York Times and other publications repeated the slur by government scientists and demanded censorship.

And so, when officials demand that Facebook censor lab leak theory, we should ask if it might be because they, or their allies, contributed to a lab leak.

And when they demand YouTube censor “hate speech,” we should ask if it might be because they themselves are spreading hate speech of their political enemies.

Think about it. There’s zero evidence of any measurable increase of hate speech in any of the places where elites are demanding censorship of it. It’s clear that the elites running the Censorship Industrial Complex are demanding censorship of the people they hate.

We caught multiple media outlets lying about a supposed increase in anti-Semitism. We found they were labeling criticisms of George Soros, which didn’t mention his background, as “anti-Semitic,” which is not only inaccurate but also unethical, insulting, and dangerous.

Would you be surprised to learn that Soros’ Open Society Foundations funds the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the censorship advocacy organization that produced the junk report claiming an increase in anti-Semitism?

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