“That was really the beginning of starting to understand that there was a vast apparatus of government agencies around the world- not just the United States- thinktanks, some of them associated with Universities, and other groups that were putting pressure on social media platforms to engage in outright censorship of people for just having different views” - Michael Shellenberger (per MSN.com)
This quote from Michael Shellenberger, a lead investigator on the Twitter Files points to the moment he himself realised the severity of what is now coined the Censorship Industrial Complex. This is a ‘vast apparatus’ indeed, much like the military industrial complex from which the name was taken, involving dozens of government agencies and non-government contractors working, in this case, to eradicate “disinformation, misinformation, or malinformation” from the online space. As we will see later, this often means the censorship of dissenting views that challenge policy orthodoxies.
U.S. Security State
First for context purposes, we must note that unethical and anti-democratic practices of the U.S. Security State isn’t exactly a revelation. Ever since the Church Committee ruling, we have understood the psychological operations of the FBI, how it infiltrates political movements that it deems ‘subversive’ and funnels disinformation through media outlets in order to sway public opinion. The Church committee unveiled COINTELPRO, the operation which involved the infiltration of various political and civil rights groups, including Martin Luther King and Anti-Vietnam War protesters, in order to survey them and malign their public image. It also revealed the infamous “Family Jewels” operation of the CIA, which included the covert assassination of foreign leaders, the staging of military coups and much more. It is also important to mention the CIA’s record of wiretapping prominent journalists and manipulating the U.S. media output, as illuminated originally in the Watergate Hearings, then by journalist Seymour Hersh in his famous 1974 NY Times piece, and finally by the Church Committee hearings. These practices underline the active role the CIA played in influencing U.S. media outlets both domestically and abroad in the era following the Cold War, much of which comprised the infamous Operation Mockingbird.
Of course, these operations were all highly illegal, yet through carefully crafted state sponsored propaganda, many Americans are not only unaware of these indisputably unethical practices, but they believe that America is impervious to such egregious violations of the Democratic process. This being said, the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies are essential to the security and viability of the United States, they just require more regulation and oversight to prevent these violations of their charter.
Mike Lofgren, author and former U.S. Congressional staff member, retired from Capitol Hill after becoming disillusioned by the agency capture which he felt governed the decisions in Washington. Lofgren describes a pervasive symbiosis between the National Security State and Corporate interests which are sucking money out of the economy, especially the middle class. For example, the Prison Industrial complex, functions in this capacity. Due to the highly punitive sentences for drug related crimes implemented under the Nixon and then Reagan administrations, the United States imprisons more people than China, an authoritarian state with 4x times our population. Why? Because more prisoners means more prisons to be built, which means more government contractors hired and more taxpayer money funnelled to those involved. If we look at the Military Industrial Complex, we see the exact same phenomenon; more war means more weapons productions, which means more contracts for weapons producers such as Raytheon (now RTX) or Lockheed Martin, companies that already employ thousands of former government employees. As outlined by Lofgren in his interview with Bill Moyers in 2014, “There are over 400,000 contractors, private citizens, who have top secret security clearance” who make up the heart of what we understand as the Military Industrial Complex. This marriage of corporate interests and Security State objectives again is nothing new, it is simply more pernicious than ever before.
Ever since the 19th century the U.S. has been conducting illegal psychological operations and military coups in foreign countries, often under the guise of “saving democracy” or “stopping the spread of communism”. In reality these coups, such as those in Central America in the early 20th century, were conducted in order to remove democratically elected leaders who were intent on taking back their countries resources from U.S. control. This was the case with Presidents Jose Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua 1909 and Miguel Davila in Honduras 1911, both of whom wanted U.S. companies to refrain from stripping their nations of vital resources and commodities.
In Iran in 1953, The U.S., in collaboration with U.K. Intelligence, destabilized the country through subterfuge tactics and successfully overthrew the elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh in ‘Operation Ajax’. This was yet again due to a nation’s leader wanting to take back his country’s resources from foreign powers. In this case British oil company Anglo-Iranian oil (now BP) was dominating Iran’s most precious natural resource. By funding subversive political groups and spreading propaganda, CIA agents in Iran successfully destabilized the country leading to the 1953 coup d’état. The coup allowed the U.S. to reinstall Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as leader. This meant that the U.S. now had a U.S. friendly dictator in a middle east stronghold who allowed them to continue to plunder Iranian oil. Pahlavi’s brutal reign and oppression lead to the eventual 1979 Iranian coup d’état, and the installation of an Islamist government lead by Ayatollah Khomeini. Ever since then Iran has been a sworn enemy of the United States. This contentious geopolitical rivalry which persists today therefore stems from this aforementioned fusion of U.S. corporate incentives and U.S. Security State incentives (in this case oil companies and projection of power in the Middle east). These are only a handful of dozens of coups and anti-democratic practices of the military industrial complex.
Mike Lofgren articulates yet again how this “government within a government” operates without constitutional constraint regardless of whether it is a Democratic or Republican administration in office. He questions why a candidate such as Barrack Obama, who ran a campaign based on rejection of the Iraq war, illegal surveillance, and most policies of the Bush administration, could end up continuing so many of these policies, in some cases fortifying them. His Secretary of Defense, perhaps the most important member of his cabinet, was Robert Gates, an “old Bush family consigliere who presided over the surge in Iraq” as Lofgren put it. Obama appointed John Brennan as CIA Director after he worked as a CIA official in the Bush administration. Victoria Nuland, a longtime war monger and former foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney was promoted first to State Department spokesperson, then to assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under Obama. She is also the diplomat behind the alleged U.S. backed Ukrainian coup in 2014, coordinated to implement a pro-American and pro-EU leader in Western Ukraine. This operation, which reignited the animosity in U.S.-Russia relations, also precipitated the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A geopolitical disaster anyway you look at it, but one which satiates the appetite for war of the military industrial complex. Nuland was then promoted under Trump and again under Biden.
Regardless of how much the American people disagree with the policy of these bad actors, they are somehow always in office. This phenomenon in which the avatars of the military industrial complex are never removed from power, despite how much citizens or even an elected president disagrees with their work, is itself the “government within a government” that Lofgren described.
These government employees conducting our foreign policy rarely approach diplomacy with wisdom, instead opting for expansionist realpolitik style decision making that often values exacerbating geopolitical rivalries over prudent economic policy. For example the U.S. government’s sanctions on Russia were intended to cut the Russians off from entering into U.S. dollar transactions and hobble their ability to export energy products. But Russia simply began exporting more oil to countries like India and China who do not impose sanctions on them. In turn, they have fortified their energy export system while starving Europe of necessary oil and gas during an energy crisis. Furthermore, the decline in hegemony of the U.S. dollar has been accelerated now that countries have seen this weaponization of the world’s top reserve currency, as they hasten to diversify investments into alternative currencies. This is where the U.S. Security State’s thirst for strategic dominance over other superpowers overrides their original purpose, which is to protect American citizens. Devaluing our currency and cutting off our allies from vital energy sources in the name of ‘punishing’ Russia is bad political and economic leadership. Besides, the punishment of Russia is for an invasion that most likely wouldn’t have happened had the U.S. government not “reinvigorated” their partnership with Ukraine to combat Russia’s influence there, especially after the Kremlin made it abundantly clear that Ukraine was the brightest “red line” for them, not to be crossed by NATO countries. That’s the kind of agency capture that runs a system into the ground.
Censorship Industrial Complex: Twitter Files
Unfortunately, the Church Committee was an inflection point where we may have had a chance to decouple these financial incentives from Security State operations, but the separation never came to fruition. Around 40 years after the Church Committee findings Eric Snowden illuminated the mass surveillance being conducted on American citizens by the NSA. Just over 10 years later we now see, due to the work of Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Barry Weiss, and Lee Fang, among others, a much more pervasive practice, not just surveillance, but active disinformation campaigns against the U.S. populous in order to distort truth around topics such as corruption in the first family, Covid-19 vaccine efficacy, lockdowns, and election integrity. These journalists have appropriately coined the term Censorship Industrial Complex in relation to this censorship apparatus; somewhat tongue in cheek yes, but an apt way of paying homage to the agency capture that President Eisenhower warned us of in his Farewell Address and the trepidation he felt regarding the “unwarranted influence” of the “military industrial complex”.
The collaboration between intelligence agencies across the board from the DHS, FBI, CIA to government funded NGO’s such as the Stanford Institute’s “Virality Project”, was done in the name of combatting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation”. Anyone familiar with the Twitter Files will understand how precarious these terms are, malinformation in particular which includes true information that is “potentially harmful”. Of course, those who decide what is disinformation, consequentially decide what is true. (I encourage everyone to view the list of each organisation involved here, as laid out by the lead investigative reporter Matt Taibbi.) By removing or throttling (reducing visibility) of those that object to government policy the information landscape is bifurcated into two groups; (1) acceptable information which we see on social media and in our search engine algorithms, and (2) unacceptable information which isn’t as visible, rendering it as “fringe”, or literally as disinformation.
We’re not talking about crazy right wing ideologues that think the Covid-19 vaccines contain microchips and Donald Trump is here to save us all, who are genuinely spreading misinformation. People who posted about nuanced positions such as “you should get the vaccine, but perhaps vaccine mandates violate the civil rights underpinning Western civilization” were censored. By systematically censoring information that contains even the slightest pushback against government policy, we get a designed bottlenecking of acceptable viewpoints. When a network of hundreds of government funded NGOs have a sole purpose of flagging such posts for social media companies as “malinformation”, (because while factually true in many ways, this kind of stance could encourage vaccine hesitancy) you have an unprecedented abridgment of free speech rights. That is not just a violation of the First Amendment. It is a complete degradation and virtual effacement of the most important right in the Bill of Rights. It is an endorsement of authoritarian values, fundamentally antithetical to the concepts enshrined in the First Amendment, and it needs to be the focal point of our political discourse, not culture wars topics and Trump vs Biden talking points which dominate the media currently.
The fascinating thing about the Twitter Files is that the story is developing in real life, amongst independent journalists and non-legacy media sources, in the Biden v Missouri Supreme Court case (Murthy vs. Missouri), and in the hearings on ‘Weaponization of the Federal Government’ by the House subcommittee. Meanwhile in the Establishment media, you either hear little to nothing about this monumental story, or if you do hear about it, it is described as old news with no meaningful revelations. Anyone who did their due diligence and watched the subcommittee hearing with the lead investigators, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Barry Weiss knows that this dishonest coverage is ironically another example of the Censorship Industrial Complex at work.
Over the coming weeks in this Substack series, we will be taking a look at various areas of censorship revealed by the leaks in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files.
The first instalment will deal with a crucial area, Election Integrity.