COVID-19, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter: The Battle for Control of the Internet

COVID-19, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter: The Battle for Control of the Internet
Many observers have noted that the time through which we are living now seems unprecedented. We are all experiencing an amazing convergence of so many monumental developments that combine into a fast-moving narrative. In recent days the focus suddenly shifted from COVID-19 and compulsory vaccines to insurrection and anarchy from within. Suddenly the vaccine czar, Bill Gates, has been swept from the center stage of current events. Suddenly multi-billionaire Gates has been upstaged by multi-billionaire George Soros.

What is going on? What are the themes of continuity and disjuncture that characterize the strange and consequential sequence of events? What lies up ahead as we leave behind, probably forever, many familiar patterns of life. It seems that everything entered a period of ultra flux beginning in the opening days of 2020 with a US drone strike that martyred General Soleimani.

One of the unifying themes I seek to emphasize here is the importance of the Internet and the many media that feed into it as the most influential shaper of current events. When are we being played by experts in psyops and deception and when are we dealing with spontaneous developments that could not have been planned or spun to advance predetermined political agendas? What is the role of the Internet?

Who if anyone is in charge of what does or doesn't get covered on the Internet? Whose version of events will be highlighted and corroborated and thus be allowed to prevail as authoritative? When does a whistleblower become a conspiracy theorist? How does it happen that narratives convenient to advance the agendas of the rich and powerful, of the status quo, so often become reified as if they are true?

US President Donald Trump, the populizer of the terms, "draining the swamp" and "fake news," has waded into these fraught issues with a plan he claims will safeguard the Internet from political manipulation. In so doing he is addressing some of the core issues of Internet pluralism and freedom.

Trump's intervention into the legalities of Internet communications are not immune from their own set of dangers and possible abuses. The fact remains, however, that the drama of these cataclysmic times is serving to highlight the importance of the Internet not only as a medium for reporting events but as a vehicle that is instrumental in the shaping of events; in determining what actually happens or not. In some instances the medium is indeed the message.

Shutting Down Open Debate on the Internet

The video of the initial press conference of Dr. Daniel W. Erikson and Dr. Artin Massihi easily qualifies for inclusion in any survey of the classic contributions to Internet discussions concerning the new coronavirus. Drs. Erikson and Massihi of Bakersfield California drew on 40 years of combined experience in providing health care to their communities.

On April 25 the doctors made a point of replacing dependence on predictive models as a thing of the past in this coronavirus emergency. Instead, much actual data on the epidemiology of the infection had been collected, studied and interpreted.

The doctors set themselves the task of reporting on the local data, much of which they had obtained through their own primary research. They then explained their own understanding of the Kern County data within a larger assessment of broader epidemiological patterns throughout the United States and Europe. This assessment led them to the conclusion that the time had come to lift the lockdown and allow people to go back to work.

These front line professionals reported that the effects of the lockdown were beginning to provide evidence of negative health effects more serious than those arising directly from the new coronavirus. Drs. Erikson and Massihi enriched this commentary with some very pertinent reflections on the importance of maintaining active encounters with all kinds of microbes to stimulate the strengthening of our own immune systems.

Quarantines, social distancing and lockdowns do just the opposite. The resort to isolation and excessive washing deprive people of the means of maintaining the vitality of their natural immune systems.

Many media publishers including You Tube decided to banish the Bakersfield video from their highly censored platforms.

Unfortunately this instance of censorship was not an aberration. Rather it was an example of a very pervasive pattern. Such censorship, often done in the name of intellectually bankrupt clichés about “conspiracy theories,” has become more the rule than the exception. As the coronavirus controversies unfold it seems that the biases of the biggest Internet publishers have becom

The Internet publishers have become so obsessively self-serving that even highly accomplished professionals are being forbidden to speak and to be digitally heard, even when it comes to their own areas of academic and practitioner expertise. This prohibition on open debate even among highly qualified individuals with deep understandings of their own areas of expertise is highly detrimental to the best interests of society.

The failure to respect even the most rudimentary principles of open debate is deteriorating the basis of public discourse as well as of public health in both the narrow sense and in terms of the broader realm of societal well being.

The censorship of the Bakersfield Two is reflective of the propensity of the big Internet publishers to block out and discredit any voices, not in line with the dictates of the political lobbies they advance, embrace and in some cases embody. Hence it can be said that the Internet giants like YouTube, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are becoming enforcers of the dictates of the Deep State, of Big Brother, of the inheritances derived from the most infamous of book burners.

The authoritarian incursions of the Internet giants in partnership with government agencies and with Mockingbird media outlets like The Washington Post betray the core principles of free and democratic societies. This pattern of repression involves the shutting down of informed discussion as well as genuine disagreements based on competing interpretations of evidence.

The time has come, therefore, for the most mobilized and discerning citizens to turn their concerted attention to insisting on a moratorium on arbitrary Internet censorship. The manipulation of the Internet to advance the monopolistic powers and agendas of those who are stealing control of this medium must be stopped. They must let go of their asphyxiating lock hold on the Internet. They must do so before they culminate their theft of the most important public utility ever created in an unassailable dictatorship of the very wealthy and well connected over everyone else.

As demonstrated by Gareth Porter in Max Blumenthal's Grayzone, American Herald Tribune is one of the most consistently assailed web sites. The attacks on AHT are aimed maliciously at pushing it to the edges of public discourse. As Porter details, the attacks come from all the big Internet monopolists, from the FBI and from the fake news swamplands where CNN and The Washington Post conduct their propagandistic enterprises.

The monopolists currently holding the Internet hostage are steadily putting blocks in the way of legitimate disagreements on subjects that are at once controversial and also of vital importance in our society’s ability to even survive let alone thrive. Among the official narratives put by propagandists outside the realm of legitimate disagreement are the following: “Holocaust denial,” false alarm pandemics, geoengineering, forced fluoridation, 9/11, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the ongoing sagas of FBI/RCMP criminality, transgender surgery on minors, war with Iran, or the Deep State/media engineering of Antifa-Alt Right bipolarity. 

We must no longer abide by the often vile and audacious propaganda heaped on us by the Internet giants and their masters including the new Silicon Valley giant, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. We must not be silent or obediently docile in the face of the barrage of attacks that assault the most basic tenets of free speech and its strategic cousin, academic freedom. 

The rush by the most authoritarian agencies in our society to take over the Internet must be resisted and stopped. The Internet is a vital public utility. Hence safeguards must be put in place to stop its continued re-engineering as an advertising vehicle for a monopolistic consortium of authoritarian activists.

The burning of many urban areas in America is falling disproportionately on the neighborhoods where many Black people work and live. In some cases the worst of the violence being done in Black neighborhoods comes from well heeled youths. A portion of them live in privileged gated communities whose inhabitants are capable of purchasing security from privatized police.

Implicit in the disconnect between the stated objectives and the actions of those doing much of the property damage is a deep internal contradiction. This contradiction calls into question the leadership of the George Soros-funded agency, Black Lives Matter.

The assault on many urban areas and even small towns is alarmingly being accompanied by the removal of municipal, state and federal protections for the lives and property of average citizens. This removal of protection is coming about as a result of a strange coalition of antifa members and "allies," Democratic Party activists, and even the US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and a number of US Generals who have decided to disobey the orders of the Commander In Chief.

 This kind of violence currently engulfing America betrays the good intentions of genuine protestors seeking peaceful amelioration of the wounds inherited from intergenerational racism towards the descendants of slaves. The ascent of murder and mayhem in the inflamed domestic heartland of the world’s most heavily armed military superpower portents the continued ascent of a level of violence beyond anything humanity has thus far experienced.

How Do the Hosts of Internet Platforms Become: Internet Publishers With Protection from Being Sued?

Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has recently moved forward with the most significant anti-censorship initiative in the history of the Internet. Trump is seeking to stop the takeover of humanity’s most vital infrastructure of communications by a cabal of extremists.

Many of these extremists are closely identified with the failed run for the US presidency in 2015 of Hilary Clinton. Will Hilary Clinton oversee in America a repeat performance of the murderous mess she made in Libya in 2011? Are the color revolutions coming home to America?

Trump is seeking to impose a protective shield to safeguard the most important medium ever invented in the history of human communications across time and space.  He is taking action to preserve the core device that is currently at the very heart of the extremely fragile construction of our increasingly endangered global civilization.

In late May US President Donald Trump and US Attorney-General William Barr took a number of concrete steps to push back on those who have gone much too far in taking over the Internet as a means of advancing their own self-interested political agendas. Trump issued an executive order together with the promise of federal legislation and litigation to push back the incursions of the free and open Internet’s most ruthless saboteurs.

Much of the controversy revolves around section 230 of the Communications Decency Act passed by Congress in 1996. In a press conference, Donald Trump and Attorney-General Barr were very explicit about the need to remove the “liability shield” protecting the Internet giants from being sued for the content they do or don't publish.

When the Internet was just getting started, the idea was that some companies would host bulletin boards where any group or individual could post their notices. With this conception in the forefront, the Internet companies were granted immunity from being sued for the content of the things they posted.

Now Internet companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have long ago left behind their legal personalities as mere platforms for posting notices on digital billboards. The Internet giants have become monopolistic publishers who should be treated like publishers. They should not enjoy immunity from being sued. Nor should they enjoy a lucrative exemption from taxation as they currently do. Indeed, they should have to pay taxes in all the jurisdictions where they do business. Why should the Internet giants get tax breaks to flood us with their propaganda?

The Internet is not a resource that any party can claim to own. When it was first established to withstand nuclear attacks the Internet was designed as a very decentralized infrastructure that would not be subject to obliteration or to unilateral takeover by malevolent interests as is presently taking place.

The Internet is part of a public resource that belongs to all of humanity. It is a vital thoroughfare between those long since dead and those yet unborn. Those currently pretending to own the Internet are kleptocrats whose theft marks a new frontier of international criminality during an era when there is almost no accountability for plutocrats held to be above the law.

Trump is taking on this very political crime that goes far beyond the sabotaging of net neutrality and the subordination of governments to the control of multibillionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, Jacob Rothschild, Sheldon Adelson, Jeff Bezos or Eric Schmidt.

The Internet giants have become publishers that edit material, black list material, censor material, and remove material from being eligible for coming up in topic-directed Internet searches. The array of techniques currently being used to direct public opinion through thought policing goes on and on and on.

Since Facebook et. al. have all become politically-motivated publishers they deserve no immunity from being sued for the editorial decisions they make and the actions they perform. Facebook itself should become subject to BDS prohibitions for its ferocious taking of sides against the Palestinian facet of the Axis of Resistance. Facebook should face sanctions for its seeking to advance the cause of those intent on displacing the Arab Muslims from their holy places in order to make Jerusalem the new imperial capital of the world.

We must make it clear that Trump’s initiatives should not be allowed to replace one set of monopolistic digital publishers with his own preferred gang of digital publishers.

Of course all corporate entities that seek and obtain federal protection from being sued should rightfully attract sceptical scrutiny from all conscientious citizens. Conscientious or not, all citizens and most corporations are not endowed by the federal government with special privileges exempting them from being sued.

Those commercial entities given federal exemption from being sued include the notoriously corrupt companies that develop and sell vaccines. With this in mind, it seems an extension is in order of the motto that, to know who rules over us is to know who we are not allowed to criticize or to sue.

This corruption extends deep into federal dens where conflict of interest thrives. These corrupt agencies combine federal with corporate personalities. Their functions include the licensing of drugs including vaccines for public consumption.

Some of these federal agencies own patents. They help many processes including the granting of patents, lobbying for private companies within government, falsifying research to engineer desired results, maintaining revolving doors where corporate and government officials regularly move back and forth etc. etc. etc.. The illegal exploitation of insider knowledge on the stock market of course runs rampant.

The serial offenders like the notorious Anthony Fauci inhabit entities that include, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

How did the Big Pharma companies negotiate the sweetheart deals with the federal government allowing them to disavow any responsibility for their notoriously untested and unsafe vaccines? If the vaccine producers were so sure of the safety of their products, why did they get the federal government to agree they don’t bear any liability when vaccine injuries occur (which is often)?

How much engineering if any of the news cycle was involved in the sudden shift of the public discourse away from the false alarm of COVID-19 and the economic destruction entailed in the lockdown? Was there manipulation involved in the sudden change of focus towards Black Lives Matter, police violence and the imperatives of antifa revolutionaries trained to kill and maim people as well as destroy public property?