The censors are losing patience. They have gone from regretting the existence of free speech and gaming the system as best they can to fantasizing about ending it through criminal penalties.
You can observe this change in temperament – from frustration to fury to calling for violent solutions – over the last several weeks. And it serves as a reminder: censorship was never the end point. It was always about controlling society’s “cognitive infrastructure,” which is how we think. And to what end? A secure monopoly on political power.
This week, Fox reporter Peter Doocy was sparring with the White House spokesperson over whether FEMA is funding migrants even as it cannot help American storm survivors. She immediately shot back and called this “disinformation.” Peter wanted to know what part of his question qualified. Jean-Pierre said it was the whole context of the question and otherwise never said.
It was clear to anyone who was watching that the term “disinformation” means to her nothing other than a premise or fact that is unwelcome and needs to be shut down. This messaging has been further reinforced by a Harris/Walz ad blaming unnamed “misinformation” from Trump for exacerbating hurricane suffering following Hurricane Helene.
This exchange came only days after Hillary Clinton suggested criminal penalties for disinformation, else “they will lose total control.” It’s an odd plural pronoun because, presumably, she is not in control..unless she regards herself as a proxy for an entire class of rulers.
Meanwhile, former presidential candidate John Kerry said the existence of free speech is making government impossible. Kamala Harris herself has sworn to “hold social media accountable” for the “hate infiltrating their platforms.” And well-connected physician Peter Hotez is calling for Homeland Security and NATO to put an end to debates over vaccines
You can detect the fury in all their voices, almost as if every post on X or video on Rumble is causing them to lose their minds, to the point that they are just saying it out loud: “Make them stop.”
Hurricane Milton seems to have caused the censors to flip out in a violent rage, as people wondered whether and to what extent the government might have something to do with manipulating the weather for political reasons. A writer in the Atlantic explodes: “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is. What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis,” while decrying “outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet.”
Catch that? It’s the viewing itself that is the problem, as if people do not have the capacity to think for themselves.
The old meme of the man staying up late typing because “someone is wrong on the Internet” applies now to an entire swath of the ruling class. They want freedom out and the stakeholders in control, somehow forcing the whole of the digital age into a version of 1970s television with three channels and 1-800 numbers. The Biden administration even refounded the Internet, replacing the Declaration of Freedom with a new Declaration of the Future.
We are reminded of Katherine Hepburn’s performance as Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly, Last Summer.
Violet is an heiress and widow with a son Sebastian on whom she doted and with whom she traveled internationally for many years. One summer, her niece Catherine (played by Elizabeth Taylor) goes on the trip instead and the son dies.
Catherine was clearly traumatized by something but she doesn’t know what. But this much remained in her memory: Sebastian was not a good man. Instead he used the women who accompanied him as bait to procure boys for his sexual pleasure.
Violet was so infuriated with this observation – all she could remember about Sebastian’s death – that she sent Catherine to a mental hospital. She further has every intention of endowing a local hospital to specialize in lobotomies on the condition that they give one to Catherine.
Violet wants Catherine to stop her “babblings” and instead “just be peaceful.” Catherine observes that they simply want to cut the truth out of her head before she comes around to recalling the whole of it, which is more horrible than one can imagine.
Doctor: “There still is a great deal of risk.”
Violet: “But it does pacify them, I’ve read that. It quiets them down. It suddenly makes them peaceful.”
Doctor: “Yes, that it does do, but…”
Her goal was an invasive surgery on her sister’s daughter, which she was willing to fund in order to assure it would take place by a major gift in the guise of philanthropy. It was all in the interest of psychological self-protection.
Violet simply did not want to know the truth. She wanted instead her own “truth” to be the constructed narrative: her son was a wonderful and pious gentleman and her niece was a crazy person, a deplorable, a speaker of misinformation and disinformation.
In order to protect Violet’s own self-perceptions and her own delusion, she was willing to invade the brain of her own niece with a knife to stop her from clear thinking and clear speaking.
Catherine: “Cut the truth out of my brain. Is that what you want? You can’t. Not even God can change the truth.”
As with all of Tennessee Williams, and all great literature, the story is about far more than what it seems. It is really about the lengths to which a wealthy ruling class is willing to go in order to prevent the puncturing of their own illusions about the world.
In those days, lobotomies were more common, even approved, and often deployed by those who could afford them to be imposed on relatives. The stories are quite legendary, so there was nothing unrealistic about Williams’s story. Psycho-surgery was deployed for decades in the service of cutting truth out of people’s brains.
So far we’ve only experienced a relatively low-grade version of this compared with what they really want. YouTube accounts have been demonetized and deleted. Facebook posts have been throttled and banned. LinkedIn’s algorithms punish posts that take issue with regime narratives. This has not slowed down in light of litigation but rather continued and intensified.
The goal is to close up the Internet. They would have done it by now if it were not for the First Amendment, which stands in their way. For now, they will continue to work through university cutouts, third-party providers, phony baloney fact-checkers, pressure on tech firms that provide government services at a price, and other mechanisms to achieve indirectly what they cannot do directly just yet.
Among the strategies is the political persecution of dissenters. Alex Jones is a bellwether here and his company is being bankrupted. Steve Bannon, the philosopher king of MAGA, has been in jail for the entire election season for having defied a Congressional subpoena on the advice of counsel. The protestors on January 6 have been in prison not for damages caused or trespassing but for landing on the wrong side of the regime.
Most of us had an intuition that the Covid vaccine mandates themselves were not entirely about health but rather a tactic of exclusion of those who were not fully trusting of authority. This was rather obvious when it came to the military and the medical profession but less apparent within academia where noncompliant students and professors were effectively purged for their refusal to risk their lives for pharma.
There was an element of malice, too, in the mask mandates. Even though there was zero scientific evidence that a Chinese-made synthetic cloth worn on the face can change epidemiological dynamics, they did serve well as a visible sign to separate believers from unbelievers, and also as a sadistic means of reminding individualists of who is really running the show.
The final means of censorship is violence against person and property, while the end is to control what you think in service of one-party rule. Major tech companies and major media are wholly complicit in bringing this about. Only a handful of services are stopping this and they are all being targeted by the regime through myriad forms of lawfare.
In the final scenes of Suddenly, Last Summer, Catherine is finally induced to recall the horrifying details of her cousin’s death and tell family members the fullness of the truth. Aunt Violet cannot handle it and defaults into denial and psychopathology herself, dishing out her own litany of disinformation.
Therein the viewer is presented with the deepest irony of all: every claim that Violet made against Catherine eventually comes to pertain to Violet herself. The person who wanted to use violence to cut the brain out of the truthspeaker was merely protecting herself against a terrible truth that she could not handle.
And there it is: it’s the liar more than anyone who has reason to fear free speech.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and ten books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
