Could today’s digital algorithm be the new world speak rhetoric? Well, not exactly. I encourage you to go over and read a piece by Matt Taibbi on Racket News. He titled it The Elite War on Free Thought. It’s an incredible reminder of what is happening with the demise of American freedom. It’s thought-provoking, and I highly recommend you bookmark that article to read over and over again.

It may seem like a novel in fiction, but it is becoming our reality. Free thought is under attack. The term “under attack” might be a knee-jerk reaction, but let’s look at Matt’s article.

He, of course, opens with the First Amendment and what it means to us as Americans. Everything. He reminds us that this right wasn’t given to us by the government but was a part of us already. Matt then briefly explains what he found when given the Twitter files.

What Michael (Shellenberger) and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

That last sentence is striking, isn’t it? It won’t be the only one. We’ve been conditioned to censor ourselves. You know it’s true.

Michael Shellenberger is also making the rounds.

He warns of the Censorship Industrial Complex and his 68-page testimony to The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (March 9, 2023).

It’s terrifying that governments are cracking down on free speech, but it’s also proof that they are losing control. And, in London tonight, Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, and I will launch our campaign to tear down the Censorship Industrial Complex. LFG!https://t.co/ppGvIZTjFj

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) June 22, 2023

I know many people have referenced the dystopian cautionary social science fiction tale by George Orwell’s 1984. I hear it referenced a lot. Even Matt Taibbi brings it up in his article. I’m starting to see the similarities here in our real life. You know, I am one of those people who didn’t want to believe it at first, but the more and more this type of thing is exposed by journalists who are not afraid to do their job, and there are not many these days, it is hard to deny anymore.

Articles like Matt Taibbi’s are starting to make Roseanne Barr’s podcast and the James O’Keefes of the world seem not so ridiculous.

I grew up believing the Walter Cronkites, the David Brinkleys, and the Jane Pauleys back in the day when broadcast journalists appeared nightly to tell the citizens the news. It was a fundamental part of my upbringing.

Now enter the digital age, social media platforms, government school activism, and the overreach of corrupt agencies like the FBI, and here we are in today’s world.

Changing the language and terms we use, to the separation of the people into groups, to now the government in big tech dictating what the people see, will turn into a George Orwell book if we aren’t careful.

A quick personal story.

I will tell you a quick story about when COVID first hit the United States, and all the news organizations talked about the hospitals filling up and having to put large tents up in the parking lot to take on patients. It was everywhere in the first part of 2020. Good grief, they constantly displayed a death toll ticker on the television screen. I remember going to Twitter and being surprised to see a video of a regular person going to his local hospital, where he recorded a video to put out on social media. In his video, his hospital was EMPTY. I was so stunned that I didn’t believe him because he wasn’t someone famous on television. SHAME ON ME. However, I did soon wise up after that, after turning off the television.

Still, I look at things on the internet with much skepticism. And constantly ask questions.

This sentence from Matt’s article stands out:

“This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices,” wrote Graphika, in a report sent to Twitter, “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”

And now we are being influenced into thinking there is black or white, this or that, only left or right, taking sides to feed us their misinformation. They section us into small subgroups and label us with specific characteristics, hoping we will loathe one another.

One last thing from Matt.

What happens to a society that doesn’t square its mental books when it comes to facts, truth, errors, propaganda and so on? There are only a few options. Some people will do what some of us in this room have done: grow frustrated and angry, mostly in private. Others have tried to protest by frantically cataloging the past.

Most however do what’s easiest for mental survival. They learn to forget. This means living in the present only. Whatever we’re freaking out about today, let’s all do it together. Then when things change tomorrow, let’s not pause to think about the change, let’s just freak out about that new thing. The facts are dead! Long live the new facts!

Okay, one more quote I will leave you with from Andrew Breitbart. I know you’ve probably heard it a thousand times if you listen to Breitbart News Daily in the morning on the Patriot channel on SiriusXM.

I want my Legacy to be, that they know that they screwed with the wrong guy. In the United States of America you have the right to think freely, you have the right to do whatever you want…. the idea that the Democrat Media Complex will tell you that you are a slave to an ideology… to a mindset that if you don’t abide by it, we are going to punish you severely — that’s as un-American as anything I can possibly imagine. I don’t care if you agree with me or disagree with me on policy, what I care about is that you have the freedom in this country to run your life as a free, rugged individualist. I am at war with anybody who would tell you that you don’t have a right to be a free man.

Stay free, America.

Feature Image: Speech Bubble Pop Art/ CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication