A Red Line

Another constraint on Big Brother's grip

This week, I’d like to look at a poll that indicates another constraint on Big Brother’s control. A Rasmussen poll recently found that 63% of Americans want the FBI’s social media activities investigated. Only 22% of those polled opposed such an investigation.

What’s most interesting to me is that “Majorities of every political category – 52% of Democrats, 75% of Republicans and 63% of unaffiliated voters – believe Congress should investigate whether the FBI was involved in censoring information on social media sites.”

In many ways, the censoring of social media sites benefitted Democrats - most particularly by deep-sixing the Hunter Biden Laptop story prior to the 2020 election. The fact that a majority of Democrats want an investigation of the FBI’s censoring of social media indicates there is a red line here that transcends partisan politics.

I think many Americans have a strong value that police and law enforcement should be scrupulously non-partisan - in particular, that the power of the state’s legal apparatus should never be used to limit free speech - at least, not in peace time.

I can remember seeing countless media stories growing up about how the Stazi or the KGB controlled what appeared in the media in Communist countries. Such interference in press freedom was always presented as one of the great moral failings of Communism. I have to think most Americans have internalized the contrary principle: that in America, the State, and law enforcement in particular, must never interfere with freedom of the press. To do otherwise would be un-American.

There have also been a surprising number of FBI whistleblowers on this issue - which to me says that many in law enforcement also see this as a sacrosanct principle.

Granted, the FBI, the CDC and Democrat House Leader Adam Schiff got Twitter to do their bidding for a long time before Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter opened up that organization to external scrutiny. But now that the extent of that censorship has been revealed, I suspect there will be a reckoning.

With luck, any investigation will also look at FBI and Government interference in Youtube, Facebook and the various search engines.

Social media is not without value. When not under Big Brother’s thumb, it gives us a sense of what others are thinking, and introduces us to other points of view. It can be a useful forum for debate.

I strongly suspect we would have stopped COVID lockdowns and school closures far sooner if the major social media had been more inclusive of different points of view, especially regarding scientific data which contradicted the official narrative. That would have had large benefits for our collective mental health.

Perhaps the most important value of social media is that it can spread information that governments and billionaires have carefully scrubbed from the mainstream media.

Yesterday the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, declaring that the risk of nuclear war has never been higher than it is right now. If you get your news only from the mainstream, this may seem a trifle hyperbolic.

If you’ve been following the Ukraine War on alternate sources - on Twitter, Youtube, and blogs linked to same - you’ll know that Ukraine is losing the war badly at this point in time, and that there are serious turf wars within the Ukrainian Government.

The US Government, having bet the farm on Ukraine winning, will be sorely tempted to forestall the collapse of Ukrainian defenses by quickly rushing tanks into Ukraine crewed by NATO soldiers dressed in Ukrainian uniforms. (It will take months to train Ukrainian tank crews on the American and German tanks - and Ukraine’s defenses won’t last that long.)

The risk then is that Russia will decide it is no longer in a proxy war. If Russia realizes they are fighting hundreds of NATO soldiers, Russia may consider itself to be at war with NATO.

America and Russia - and before that the USSR - have found themselves at loggerheads often over the past 75 years. Despite this chequered past, both sides have worked very diligently to avoid going to war with each other. The reason for this is quite simple: the risk of any armed conflict between Russia and the United States escalating to an all-out nuclear conflagration is immense. A couple of misread signals and fifteen minutes later hundreds of ICBMs would be airborne. Afterwards, the survivors would envy the dead.

What we have in Washington is a senile President surrounded by sociopaths willing to engage in an insane brinkmanship which puts all of humanity at risk. That’s crucially important information everyone on this planet should have right now.

Twitter and Youtube have been invaluable in alerting a huge number people to the danger we face.

I’m glad that people have a strong red line that the Deep State should not be permitted to censor what we can see on social media. Our survival may depend on being aware of the risks we face, and organizing to find ways to reduce those risks.